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candidate, the British Communist Press published special Irish supplements, for which, presumably, special subsidies were received from Moscow. The policy of the Komintern in Ireland is carried out by Larkin by means of unofficial sectional strikes, agitation amongst the unemployed, and violent opposition to the official Irish Transport Workers' Union. Jack Carney is a frequent visitor to Moscow.

Up till March 1928 it was not thought that any strong connections existed between the Bolsheviks and the semisecret revolutionary Irish Republican Army, although it was known that in 1925 certain Republicans paid a visit to Moscow. In March 1928, however, as all England now knows, information came into the hands of the authorities that large quantities of revolvers and ammunition were being smuggled into England by Irish Republicans. Raids 7 and arrests were made by the police in London and large quantities of arms were seized. Some Irish Republicans were arrested, and when one of them was searched he was found to have in his possession currency notes which were traced back to a Soviet banking institution in this country. At the time of the discovery of these arms it was thought that they were for use in an attack on the Irish Free State Government, but it is far more probable that they were intended for a definite terrorist campaign in England itself, to be carried out if the Bolsheviks made any armed attack on any part of the Empire, a campaign designed to hinder and prevent the transport of troops and munitions, and disorganize public morale and the maintenace of order in a time of national crisis.

N. Bukharin, at the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:

"The Executive Committee of the Communist International has decided . . . to place the colonial question in all its magnitude on the agenda of the next International Congress of the Komintern. Everyone knows that the colonial question is acute. We have accumulated much experience. The experience of the Chinese revolution is truly inexhaustible; one can and must sum up results in this sphere and adopt a definite line of policy for various other countries. That is why this question will play an exceptionally important and big rôle at the Congress of the Komintern in May 1928.”

J. BAKER WHITE

To the ordinary citizen, and still more to a member of the former Military Mission in Austria and Hungary, the campaign in favour of the revision of the Peace Treaties must come as a surprise.

The large-minded and generous attitude of Great Britain towards ex-enemies, who, not so long since, would have ruthlessly dismembered the Empire, and who, in fact, came within an ace of doing so, would be difficult to parallel in the history of civilized nations. No one desires that the old hatreds, the rancour, and suspicion of the war-period and years immediately succeeding should be perpetuated! No one desires that bitter memories and evil experience should inspire or colour our present foreign policy! But before being swept off their feet by picturesque accounts of the sad plight of former enemies, the British public should remember the claims of our former friends and allies.

It is, perhaps, a tribute to Great Britain and the British character that there can always be found among us some who are prepared to plead the cause of former foes, while it is too easily assumed that our friends, of the past or present, can speak for themselves! This somewhat quixotic attitude resembles in no small degree that extraordinary popular sympathy with a convicted criminal which provides thousands of signatures for a reprieve petition in the case of many notorious murderers.

Carried away by the sentimentality of the moment, unthinking members of the community see only the spectacle of an unfortunate human being awaiting death. They forget entirely the sufferings of the victim, the horrors of the crime, the misery and pain which it inevitably occasions; one and all caused by the callousness of the criminal. They forget that once it was within his power to stay his hand; that once an appeal for mercy was made to him and in vain; that once he could have avoided setting in motion all that elaborate machinery of police and judiciary which now is to prove his ruin; that it is only because he once scorned the dictates of reason, of mercy, of prudence even, that he is now to die.

Not less self-occasioned are the sorrows of the defeated aggressors in the Great War. The most cursory examination will show that the appeals to the popular imagination for treaty revisions, in favour of our ex-enemies and to the disadvantage of those nations who fought loyally on our side during the war, are scarcely better founded. Especi

ally is this so concerning Hungary and the Treaty of Trianon.

Hungary has unquestionably come badly out of the war. To the north, she has lost territory to CzechoSlovakia; to the east, to Roumania; to the south, to the Yugo-Slavs; and in the west, to Austria. She rules, to-day, over but one-third of the historic Hungary. Her woods and forests, her mines, her mountains, and practically all the territory outside the Alföld, or great central plain, have passed into other hands. Her natural economic balance is thus shattered. Quantities of her live stock and rolling stock have been taken from her under one or another head of reparations. She has been practically disarmed. Three millions of her people, 100 per cent. Magyars, live now under foreign rule. She has lost her ports, her access to the Adriatic. She is surrounded by States which, through fear of her resurrection and possible desire for reprisals, have sunk their differences sufficiently to form a military alliance directed against her heart. She is ruled by a Regent for a monarch who cannot even enter his own kingdom. She has been for years a continual centre of discontent and unrest in European politics.

All this and more is perfectly true. But what then? War is a dreadful thing-a terrible ordeal by battle, in which one or other combatant must go under. The late allies of Hungary, the Germans, excused every outrage against the laws of war or humanity with the curt phrase: "Krieg ist krieg." Nothing can be quite the same after any war, however local, however small; and is it to be wondered at, therefore, that those nations vanquished in the Great War have paid a bitter price for their original free and considered decision to fling themselves suddenly on their unprepared neighbours?

Whatever may be said or written of war guilt or war responsibility, this much is certain: in 1914, the Central Powers were prepared to the last man, to the last cartridge, to the last train; while the Allies were woefully, pitifully, terribly unprepared. He who recalls this fact may judge. Again, never has it been shown that Hungary came reluctantly into the war, or that she, from beginning to end, ceased to strain every nerve, every muscle, to snatch the victory. Those who know the Magyar, his military virtues, his history, his character, his tenacity, his not unjustified belief in his prowess as a conqueror, will need no reminding of this. For a thousand years he has ruled over old Pannonia, over the most fertile regions of Central Europe, by the sword. By the sword he came; by the sword he stood.

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In dealing with subject peoples, his one appeal, his one reply, was ever to the sword. For centuries he struggled with his competitors and would-be supplanters, the Turks, less to save Western Europe for Christendom than to hold his own rich possessions. When the shattering defeat of Mohács struck for a century and more the broken sword from his hand, it was a Pole, John Sobieski, and the verminous mob of Vienna who saved Europe from Turkish domination. In the breathing-space allowed by this victory, the Magyar reformed his ranks, and, bit by bit, regained his lost territory. Such is, in a few words, the troubled history of the Magyar in Central Europe, and no to-day denies him a meed of respect and sympathy in his new hour of defeat. But where is the great injustice if, in the case of Hungary, what war gave, war has taken away? Does not Scripture say: "He who takes the sword shall perish by the sword"?

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Had the Central Empires emerged victorious from the Great War, can the fate of Czech, Slav, Croat, Rouman, Pole, under a reinvigorating Magyar rule, be pictured? The provisions of the Treaty of Bucarest imposed on Roumania in 1917 give us an idea of the Magyar in victory.

These subject races, to say the least, were not spoilt, even prior to 1914! It is not necessary to stress what their position would have been to-day. Destiny decided that the subject peoples of the Central Empires should be free, and that freedom, if it were to be more than chimerical, involved certain radical operations upon the prerogatives and upon the territories of their former rulers. It must not too readily be assumed that the Treaty of Trianon, which only implemented the decrees of fate (and, as will be seen, not unjustly), was drawn up by imbeciles.

The nature of the peace terms imposed upon the defeated nations naturally varied with the geographical position and political situation of each.

Thus, under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was deprived of her fleet and her colonies, the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine and certain rich territories on her eastern and south-eastern frontiers. She was, further, cut off from East Prussia by the Polish Corridor. The military occupation of the Rhine bridge-heads, a severe scale of reparation payments, and the disbandment of her army, were additional punishments inflicted on her as our principal and most dangerous adversary. The complete break-up of the Austrian Empire came rather from within than without, and the Treaty of St. Germain, in so far as it re-allotted her territories, merely gave legal effect to national and racial

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divisions already in being. The various former provinces of the Empire have fallen, in a large measure, fairly into the hands of the races to whom they should, from an ethnological standpoint, belong.

Vienna alone provides an insoluble problem, since it is left as a great head within a tiny body, almost incapable of supporting it. Austrians, or the majority at least, are satisfied with the Treaty; and the dissatisfied minority look to "Anchluss," Anchluss," or union, with Germany as a practical political programme rather than to frontier adjustments or treaty revisions.

Turkey, of course, through the genius of Kemal Pasha, or rather through the ineptitude of his opponents, has escaped the consequences of the Treaty of Sèvres, and goes unscathed under the provisions of that of Lausanne. With the Sèvres Treaty the Capitulations even went into the discard. Turkey, therefore, is to be congratulated rather than pitied. On balance, she is stronger than ever. Bulgaria resembles, and resembled, the butterfly perched on the mouth of a loaded cannon at Marengo, and of which Napoleon said, when it was seen to survive the discharge: "Its insignificance saved it." The terms of the Neuilly Treaty have left her in not a widely different position from that which she occupied prior to 1914. Although she has lost Thrace and her gean littoral, she is young, small and resilient, with immense powers of recuperation. Indeed, her problems are now internal rather than external.

Hungary alone of our old enemies strains at her chains, gnaws her bonds, and calls on high Heaven and the world at large to witness the injustice of her fate. But are the provisions of the Treaty of Trianon so very more unjust than those of St-Germain, Neuilly, Versailles, Sèvres ? No peace treaty professes to treat victors and vanquished alike. "Væ victis!" is the rule to-day, as ever. If our friends and allies throughout the war-Czech, Roumanian, and Serb-were to reap the reward of their sacrifices, if they were to be assured of that self-determination promised by the Versailles Peace Conference, their new territories had to be mapped out in such a way as to ensure continuity of these so-called Succession States. And each of them had populations, properties, possessions, within the old borders of Hungary. Hungary's mutilation arose from political necessity and her geographical position rather than from any scheme of humiliation or revenge on the part of the Treaty makers. It is necessary to recall briefly the political position at the close of the war. Hungary was in the throes of internal revolution and menaced on VOL. XCI

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