National Ordeal

Policemen lined the streets of Budapest. They scooted about on bicycles. Whenever Admiral Horthy, Regent* of the Kingdom of Hungaria, rode forth, the policemen cleared the entire street down which he was to ride. At length they held back an enormous crowd gathered to witness the opening of the Hungarian Parliament. Excitement ran high, for it was known that Premier Count Bethlen would present to the Deputies the Government's position with respect to the "national scandal," the recently discovered plot to flood France with counterfeited -in- Hungary 1,000-franc notes (TIME, Jan. 18). Premier Bethlen slipped into the Parliament building by a side entrance. For two hours he held last minute conferences with the leaders of the Opposition in the lobbies --cajoled, threatened, begged. It became obvious to the merest dullard that the Government found itself indeed most severely compromised by the discovery of the plot through the activities of French detectives, and the arrest of 70 persons including the chief of police of Budapest. Finally Count Bethlen succeeded in getting the Opposition leaders to promise that they would restrain their cohorts from too many embarrassing questions. The Deputies filed into the Chamber itself. President Zitovsky declared Parliament in session: "Not since the Treaty of Trianon was imposed upon Hungary at the close of the War, have we gone through such an ordeal as now. . . . This scandal is inflicting colossal harm upon our country. We owe it to her prestige, nay to her very existence, to see that this dastardly crime is expiated." Premier Bethlen arose. The Deputies leaped to their feet and created such an uproar that Parliament had to be temporarily suspended. At length the Premier obtained a hearing. He spoke for three hours. At the end of that time the maxim, "Speech was given man to conceal his thoughts," had been well illustrated. Premier Bethlen obviously found it impossible to risk pinning the blame for the plot upon anybody--presumably because the guilty are all so extremely close to the Government. Amid repeated cries of "Resign! You are shielding forgers!" Count Bethlen proceeded merely to touch vaguely upon all the theories so far advanced to account for the crime, and wound up by stating that its "purely criminal aspects" must be left strictly in the hands of the courts, but that he would welcome a Parliamentary investigation into the Government's responsibility. After several days of party dickering an investigating committee was formed and began to deliberate in secret. The Significance. There appears to be no doubt that the counterfeiting was undertaken with far wider aims in view than the mere enrichment of the counterfeiters. Scarcely anyone questioned last week that its purpose was to finance a putsch designed to set a king upon the vacant throne of Hungary. Count Bethlen himself referred to the counterfeiters in Parliament as "misguided patriots." Regent Horthy refused to refer to them at all--a most significant gesture on the part of a "ruler" who should nominally have been the first to condemn such acts. The identity of the individual in whose favor the putsch was to have been launched remained obscure. Regent Horthy and Count Bethlen both appear to be badly tarred with the counterfeiters' brush; but the Regent is a Fascist and the Count a Legitimist. The Fascists are supposed to desire the Archduke Albrecht of Habsburg as king; the Legitimists of course support the "legitimate heir," Prince Otto of Habsburg, son of the abdicated Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary. Further, it is not unlikely that only a partial putsch leading to a dictatorship, which would later give way to a monarchy, was planned. Observers recalled that "history is a tissue of lies agreed upon." Last week the difficulty appeared to be that some delay was being experienced in fabricating the tissue. The scapegoats had not yet been separated from the to-be-white-washed sheep.

* It has never been determined for whom the Admiral is Regent. He administers this "kingless kingdom" under the old Habsburg constitution.