Book Description

Excerpt from Across the Blockade: A Record of Travels, in Enemy Europe The doctor was an altruist, but before long the capitalist had brought back the talk to his own sad case. Think of it, man, he was saying. Do you realize what the fall of the krone means? All we have falls with it. We used to be able to buy 105 francs with 100 kronen, and now we can barely get 17. It's ruin. It means that none of us is worth a fifth of what we had, and then he went on to propound a muddle-headed theory that mortgages at least were safe. The doctor had a clear head, and he tore that imagination to pieces. Look here, he said, you advanced kronen on a cottage before the war. You paid out kronen that were kronen. To-day, your man pays you back, but he pays you in kronen that are worth only a fifth of their Old value. You lose four in five. No, no, mortgages are no safer than anything else. Then I'm ruined, said the small capitalist, and he sank into gloomy silence till the train drew up at his station. Half an hour later the train crossed the frontier into Hungary. Flags were flying. There was a strange electric air of animation in the station. On the Austrian side of the line men bent their heads and said that they were ruined. On the Hungarian side they had taken the plunge. Debts and mortgages, loans and share-capital, all the old lumber had gone, and men walked with quicker steps because they were facing a new life. After that conversation in the train I began to under stand why the opposition to the Social Revolution in Budapest had been so slight. Are one 's privi leges as a bourgeois worth defending, when one has had to drop all the small luxuries of life? Does one battle for respectability, when one's wardrobe is reduced to the last three-year-old suit? Does one fight for property when its meas ure in currency has sunk to 20 per cent? There are two factors in every revolution, the impetus of the force that makes for change, and conviction of the forces that resist it. When every bourgeois knows already that he is ruined, who is going to rush the Bolshevist barricades? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.