Count Stefan Bethlen,aged about fortyeight,becomes Ministerpresident or PM. I am told that one effect of recent losses of territory by Hungary has been to leave about fifty percent of the present population Protestant with some affinity to the Wee Frees.This accounts for the visit of the American and English Unitarians to Transylvania last autumn. The Magyars shrieked about their treatment by the Roumanians.The parsons after a three months 'tour gave the Roumanians a rare dressing-down,and said that it was like placing Mexicans over two million Americans... ...had an innings with Mr.Barber about trade and commerce.He gave me some interesting and relevant facts.I never realised before that Hungary was now one-third her former size and population;had lost all her mines,iron ore,forests,half of her coal,headwaters,etc.,and was reduced to the status of a large farm.Albert Apponyi recommends a waiting policy, sure that the peace is untenable,but also that no basis exists yet for modification. In fact-pensions-y toujours!Qiute sound...

Sunday,April 17,1921.

...lunched with Mr.Davidson,of the Cronicle,and Mr.Dicker,of the Chicago Daily News. They have been about in this part of the world all the winter and were interesting.We are all agreed that the opening-up of all frontiers of the Old Dual Monarchy is the only economic salvation ... ...I don't much care for all the reports here against Roumania.She is said to be rotten, everybody bribed,no governing personnel fit to run her new territory,railways hopeless for military and commercial uses,etc.,and altogether a verry sorry story of graft ,incom- petence,and peculation.Not good when Germany must have such a grudge against her and the Hungarians are always ready for any mischief on her borders...

...Spent the afternoon studying agricultural facts and statistics.Much hampered by want of figures since the Peace;all statistics are for the old Hungary.The Alfold ,the great Hungarian basin or lowlands,has lost all it's timber by the recent partition;i.e.,about six and a half million hectares out of seven and a half;much of its livestock and its fodder, twenty-four percent of its horned cattle,thirty percent of its sheep,and forty percent of its horses,half of its coal supplies,and 128,000,000 out of 144,000,000 of tons of its iron ore.Allt its salt supplies are gone,all its gold,silver.lead,copper,zinc, quicksilver,antimony,cobalt,nickel,and aluminium mines,and its natural gas. The splitting up of a hydrographically united economic whole is especially fatal to Hungary. The problem of water power will now be difficult of solution,and irrigation most precarious. The sources of energy should be,and now are not,in the same hands as the territory to be watered.The new arrangement is like handing over the Assuan Dam to the Dervishes.

The Vag(Waag),Tisza,and Maros can only carry their timber to the timberless Lowlands, and are not allowed to do so now. The tobacco factories and sugar refineries in the mountains will also languish,as their raw materials come from the Lowlands. The appeal of the Hungarian Geographical Society to the world is,to my mind,one of the strongest arguments against the recent so-called settlement.But what settlement,here or elsewhere,was ever made but by force? The chief agricultural products of Hungary are wheat,rye,oats,and spring barley.Potatoes are widely grown,and clover and lucerne among fodder plants.Wheat is the chief product of the Alfold.Maize is a big crop.So is sugar beet.That remarkable publication, The Magyarorszag Gazdasagi Terkepekben,or Economics of Hungary(1920),shows in a series of maps in the most striking manner the loss to Hungary by the settlement in every class of crop and industry.It is painful reading...

I wonder if the victors at Paris will allocate those forty million sapplings to the afforestation of the barren tracts that the Hungarians used to do.What will happen to the Forestry Highschool at Selmeczbanya?I wonder how the extensive irrigation system will get on when it has been broken into by the new boundaries.But the more one looks round one in this part of the world,the more one wonders and at last one ceases to wonder,for one's capacity for wonder becomes exhausted. Don't know whether the world has been made safe for democracy,but am sure that democracy has shown itself unsafe...

...Nemesis is evidently reaching the selfish Succession States too.I hear on all sides that they are loosing by their protectionist tariffs... ...Two good stories at dinner to-night.One,the receipt of a letter by the Hungarian Government from the League of Nations requesting them to establish a sanitary cordon on the Polish frontier to prevent the spread of typhus.The fact that there is no such frontier is not yet known at Geneva.The other,an F.O.letter refusing to send petrol to Budapest,but saying that a lorry would be sent out via Trieste and that it could travel backwards and forwards from Budapest to Bucharest for supplies which,they believed, were available there.A rough calculation showed that the journeyto Bucharest and back was one thousand miles or nearly as far from Budapest to London. I wished that Henry Labouchere had been alive and in diplomacy here to answer that letter.He would have made the F.O.squirm...

Tuesday,April 19,1921.

...I was amused to hear that the Roumanian Minister had not got a house yet,and that the Military Attache had only a room some 2+2 metres for a bedroom and office... The Magyars detest the Roumanians on account of their looting during the occupation... They are accused of having stolen everything moveable-plate,pictures,carpets,linen, furniture,even down to the cloth off billiard tables.They took the best thouroughbreds only to let them dye in the train for want of food. They took twelve hundred locomotives and left the Hunfgarians only four hundred. In my hotel Bela Kun had done five million crown's worth of damage. The Roumanians did seven millions worth.They took literally everything,and the rooms are still without telephones as a result of their brigandage...

Went on later to the F.O.and saw count Banffy,the new Foreign Minister,who was very courteous and interesting... He said that if Benes opned his campaign for freeing the customs within the old Empire, Hungary would be with him,but that Hungary's great difficulty was the millions of Magyars annexed to the neighbouring countries ,and the incessant complaints of ill-usage wich they brought back with them.Scarcelu a day passed without the return of refugees with these stories,and the result was that opinion in Hungary was so incensed that it would be difficult to make Parliament accept any economic agreement that did not take into full account the interests of these unfortunate Magyar minorities. Who looked after them now?I asked,and why was it left to Scottish and American Unitarians to represent the hardships of these people?The allies had forced the Treaty on Hungary,and it seemed to me their duty to control the execution of it. Yes,said Banffy,but after the ratification he presumed itwould be the League of Nations. This question of the four million Hungarians in the neighbouring States evidently gave him great concern and will affect his foreign policy very much...

...The Magyars are chivalrous,warm-hearted people who will always support their unfortunate fellow-countrymen... ...went on to see Count Albert Apponyi with whom I stayed till nearly eight discussing the general situation...He was biting about the ignorance of the Peacemakers of all the conditions of Eastern Europe.The had to be shown the positions of the largest towns. He, with Teleki,Bethlen,Hegedus,etc.,were in Paris.He found that they were given no opportunity of explaining their views,so had written to the Big Four,and finally was allowed to explain the situation on the express understanding that there should be no discussion.He spoke in French and then in English.L.G.(Lloyd George my remark) seemed struck by his remark that particular blocks of Magyars had been violently and unnecessarily detached from Hungary,although they were physically in contact with her. L.G.had passed a note to Clemenceau and afterwards had asked for further explanation and A.had brought out his ethnograohical map.He had heard from an English friend that L.G.had trounced his staff for the treatment of the Hungarians,but unfortunately nothing had been changed.

Hegedus, the Minister of Finance, is the financial magician of Hungary and will either be described hereafter as a genius or a lunatic,I don't know which.I went to see him this morning... He thought the Treaty,when he first read it, not bad, but good, because it was so bad that it could not endure. Had it been better it would have been worse... He amused me by saying that the first thing he looked at in the morning was not the state of the exchange,but the meteorological reports. The recent light rain,he said,meant milliards to him.We had forty-two days of draught before it came. Whatever the result of all these schemes may be, it must certainly be admitted that Hungary is facing her difficulties bravely and helping herself...