BOOKS OF THE MOMENT.

THE REST OF- THE PICTURE.

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Hungary. By Oscar

Jaszi. (King and Son. 158.) , The Tragedy of Charles of Hababurg. By Baron Werkthen.

(Philip Allan. 15s.) •

East of Prague. By C. J. C. Street. (Bles. 10s. 6d.)• Tim English public; even the intelligent English public, never -gives much attention to the study of foreign politics; and what attention it has to spare is now concentrated, naturally enough, on the Ruhr. It has little for the rest of Europe. Indeed, by the word -" Europe it is doubtful whether the man in the street really ever means more than England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain ; and in the doings of England, France and- Germany alone can he be persuaded to take any considerable interest. Since the War, the blaze of the conflagration in those countries near to him has .so dazzled his eyes that he can hardly see beyond them to the

rest of that Continent of which they are, geographically speaking, little more than the fringe. But (admitted that the Ruhr might be called, in medical language, the Focus of Infection) it is as absurd to try to study the present economic and political situation in our Western fringe in isolation as it would be to try to study an elaborate composition by examining only a couple of figures that loomed large in the foreground. One must spare at least some attention for the rest of the picture.

Of the problems which occupy the rest of that picture, one of the most acute is that of the -Danube Basin ; or, roughly, the dismembered Austrian Empire. The difficulties, for the man in the street, in grasping the essentials of this problem are considerable. In the first place, there is his lack of reliable, and contemporary information : he has to depend on occasional paragraphs, always incomplete and

often entirely untrue, eimPlied by the foreign correspondent of his daily paper, and on the 'various books which may possibly come his way, written by interested parties, and often coloured (through propagandist zeal) with misinformation to a fantastic extent. In the second place, the conditions are such that the problem has not only to be solved but even to be formulated in entirely different terms from any of those familiar to his political thought. There is, for instance, the question of self-determination. It is a catchword which easily lights the imagination of the insular, but one which is as fantastic in practice as to demand the measurement of beer in hours and minutes. The problem of Government by Consent for the nations of Central Europe is not capable of any territorial solution at all, whether by district plebiscite or Divine Dispensation of Versailles, for the plain reason that the different nations in antagonism do not occupy different well-defined districts, but are inextricably mixed. There are whole districts of Serbians in Hungary, colonies of Saxons (as well as Hungarians) in Rumania, German villages in Ruthenia (the easternmost end of Czechoslovakia) ; there are Italian towns on the Jugoslav coast, and a large part of the country districts of the new Italy are purely Slovene. There are villages where three incompatible nation's live cheek by jowl (and have done for many generations), each in their own quarter, speaking their own original language and" living their own lilies "Witheut showing the slightest sign of amalgamation, any breaking down of national differences. There are districts where a ten miles' stroll will "yield the observant stranger as much ethnological variety as 'a totir of half the Continent.

Nor, among all this welter, is there' any one nation capable

of governing the rest' with any degree 'of justice and con- tentment: One can take it for granted 'that whatever-nation is given control over the others will illtreat them. Thus, in any district where there are more than two nations in fairly even' numbers,

bers, one s faced by the anomaly that: self-

determination Will • deliver the -majority over to be bullied by a minority I The only two nations with any experience Of' empire, the 'Germans and the Hungarians, have already been tried in the fires of government and found wanting— for it must not be imagined that the dismemberment of the Old Austro-Hungarian Empire was an arbitrary 'act of the Peace Conference : it was a process at Work long' before the Wei, hastened, indeed, by military collapse; but "already 'ioy 1914 looming so ominously that a victorious:war; the defeat of Pan-slavism at its fountain-head, had become the- only possible hope "of its continued existence: Ave the' Slays, then (the most numerous' racial family in Central Europe), capable of supplying at* sort of Meial cohesion; any general security ? So far, they have given smell signs of it. Poland has no scioner been set on her feet than she has begun to kick her neighbours Lithuania she nearly 'suppressed altogether. Jngoslaviaexhibits the pleasant spectacle' of two brothers, the Serbs and Croats, at each others throats. CzechosIOVakia alcine, Who seems almost to qualify for the title of the Good Boy, of Central Europe, exhibits any real signs of' constructive government, and Czech' culture is as much German as it is Slay. Meanwhile, -power is 'nearly everywhere in the bands of adventurers and politicians,' with no eye but to the preserva- tion of their own position, or, at most; the temporary advan- tage of their Own State at the expenSe of everyone else.' The only advance they show upon the methods of the middle ages is that they have applied the arts of American advertising to diplomacy, and spend encirrhons sums annually in flooding England and the other Western Powers with -propaganda : they invite visits from jOinmalists, treat them as 'kings and show them just' so muchas in good for them to see ; •. hardly a week passes but some " in:spired " book or other appears, landing up some particular country or government and abusing all the others ; while the foreign correspondent is saved the trouble of looking for news for himself—they give him as plentiful supplies as his paper has room for ! Indeed, the reader has "to go on the assumption that practically "every - book recently published on Central Europe or the Balkans is unreliable (whether written by a native or an English visitor), and is probably, whether directly or indirectly; paid fcir. It is, in fact, impossible to get reliable information, or even to 'judge' of the information one does get, without frequent and careful visits to the countries themselves.

But to this general anathema Dr. Jhszi's book seems a con- spicuous exception. To say that it is unbiased Would, of course, be ridiculous—no man can take a prominent part in the affairs of his country, and see the ideals .that he stood for defeated and himself exiled, and remain unbiased and Dr Jfiszi held cabinet office under the Kisolyi administration, and like" Kirolyi and all the' Hungarian progressives is in exile, and compelled to suffer hi comparative silence the vilifi- cation of the Government propagandists. Under the circinn-' stances it is surprising, not" that he should weight the evidence ever so slightly against the Whites, but rather that he should be able to give so fair an account of his enemies, both of the Whites and Reds. One sees* here the rare spectacle of a Central European politician of real intelligence, with genuine concern for the ultimate good of his country and the neighbour- ing .States as well, attempting the difficult task of writing honest and far-sighted contemporary history. It is as far removed from the unintelligent and hysterical propagandism of a Mme. Tormay* is it well could be ; and as far removed from Baron Werkman's memoir, too. For if Dr. Jikszi is generally informative, the Most that can be said of Baron Werkman is that he is illustrative ; and the picture which he quite , unconsciously gives of the incredible ignorance of the real state, of affairs in the Empire, the complete absence of political theory, the blindness to all the signs of the times that characterized the Emperor Karl (who was a well-meaning man enough) and all his advisers—was ever governor more out 'of key with the governed Was ever the fall of an empire more inevitable ? At each end there was ignorance ; enforced ignorance in the peasant and industrialist, the ignorance of obscurantism ;- blinded ignorance in the Emperor, the result of .a system grown too complicated for its purpose, and that very purpose forgotten; while in betiveen the power and wealth of the State were concentrated and wasted in the hands of an oligarchy. That is the reel Tragedy of Charles of Habsburg:

One May well ask what hope there is, for the future. At first sight there seems very little. The fruit of misgovernment is misgovernment ; and the present " Balkanization ". of Central Europe is the inevitable result of the ignorance in which the Empire wilfully kept its subjects ; oppression is intentionally a bad school for subsequent independence.

But if there is no whole nation capable of giving the others a lead towards civilization, is there no section of the public in

"Author of "Ai Outlaw's Diary."

several different countries, no international progressive policy at all ?

Here alone there is hope ; but it is faint enough. There can be little doubt that so far as Hungary is concerned the Karolyi administration, with its policy of international amity and free trade, and democracy at home, was the sole sane one. But it never had a chance. Count Kiirolyi was swept into power in the October revolution by the force of circumstance ; and he never had the opportunity to master circumstance. It.would have needed a man of political genius, rather than of political conscience, to ride that storm and retain power long enough to establish a genuine government. With natural impatience the people turned to Bolshevism for speedier remedy ; and the pseudo-Marxian government of Bela Kun, itself obviously foredoomed, first swept away-the, possibility of reconstruction, and then, by sheer force of antithesis, made the White Revolution inevitable. The old oligarchy, debased by admixture with Combos and his terrorists, came back, and are still there, and, it seems, in a fairly stable position.

But the policy which Mirolyi represents is alive (though, alas ! far from powerful) in other countries as well ; notably there is Radid, the Croatian eader, representative of the Federalist section in Jugoslavia, who entertains exactly the

same programme of disarmament and free trade in the Danube Basin. It would be difficult for men of such different personal types as Radid and Karolyi to find themselves in close sym- pathy; but to the outsider, at any rate, there appears a remark.- able identity in their political views, at least so far as inter- national relations are concerned. Radid, the peasant leader, puts his faith in the smallholder as the surest bulwark of peace ; and indeed, it does seem as if it is with the Green, rather than the White or the Red, that the ultimate govern- ment of Central Europe lies—a political force of a magni- tude unfamiliar to the insular. Czechoslovakia, too, would welcome any international arrangement that improved her access to her south-eastern markets ; and if Federalism and the peasants should finally carry the day in Jugoslavia (the chief obstruction, that wily habitual prime-minister, Pallid, is, after all, well advanced in years), and if the progressives should return to power in Hungary (as also is possible), or the so-called White Terror should gradually change into an intelligent "- aristocratic" government (for reigns of terror always spend themselves, and the extremists in any party finally find themselves toe; weak to cope with the moderates),

the next generation, at any rate, may see an economic federa- tion of Central Europe come into being. One thing is certain :

no solution which depends either on the maintenance or the alteration of the present frontiers is possible ; the nice adjust- ment of nationalities is worse than useless ; the -solution, when it comes, must be not political but economic; must depend not on the drawing of frontiers, but on the reduction of, frontiers, and all they stand for, to a position of negligible

importance in national and international life. - These three books are all interesting ; the first two have already been referred to, and the third, which does not deal much in politics, is a vivid account of a motor tour through Czechoslovakia. The picture is perhaps a little too rosy, and the' information given shows occasionally the intervention of the official "receiver of visitors" ; but on the whole it is accurate and interesting, and covers the ground well.

H.