PERSONALITIES

Southland Times, Issue 19389, 1 November 1924, Page 11 (Supplement)

PERSONALITIES

MICHAEL KAROLYL

(By

“Ædle.”

Count Michael Karolyi, who has been granted permission by the country of his birth to live in America, and whose wife is the subject of objections by people in the United States because she is supposed to be a Bolshevik, has suffered heavily as a result of the war. He was born in 1875 with a golden Magyar spoon in his mouth, the son of one of the oldest houses in Hungary. His family’s pedigree goes back over nine hundred years and Karolyi is an hereditary peer of his country. When he was in his early twenties Michael Karolyi succeeded his father and inherited an estate valued in those days at something like £6,000,000, including an ancient palace in Budapest which harboured one of the greatest private art collections of the Old World. One of his relatives was Count Louis Bat thy any who was premier of the first parliamentary ministry in Hungary and in 1848 he was shot when the Austrians, re-taking the capital, drove Kossuth from power. Karolyi is typical of the Magyar nobility, dashing and reckless. In the old days he was known as a magnificent horseman and as a gambler of a sensational class, but at the same time he was a learned and a serious politician with radical tendencies and therefore was suspect in the eyes of the Magyar nobility. This explains in a way the bitter picture of his given by Prince Ludwig Windischgraetz, the grandson of the man who shot Batthyany, in a book of war memories. Windischgraetz was a personal friend of the unfortunate Emperor Carl, a gallant soldier and a capable minister,- so that one must accept with caution such a picture as this which he gives in the course of his book: Michael Karolyi was born with a serious defect of speech. It is well known that he has a silver palate and had, of course, most unjustly, to put up with a good deal of ridicule on account of this defect when he left the hothouse atmosphere of his home in his youth. He felt this all the more because he had been very much spoilt by his parents, proud and haughty magnates, for whom no one was good enough, and who thought themselves better than any one else. . . . And now people were rude and cruel enough to elbow him aside, ignore him and look down on him as an inferior being. This treatment by a pitiless world, and the rebuffs he received from one or other young lady of his milieu whom he admired had already stung him deeply and left an incurable wound. This malicious picture of him explains in part the readiness of his fellows to _believe the worst of him in later years when he was charged with betraying his country first to the Allies and then to the Bolsheviks. He certainly had a physical defect, but the result of this, if noticeable, was to be found' in his great ambition and his extraordinary will to and capacity for work.

Karolyi worked hard and, abandoning ,his seat in the House of Peers, won a seat in the elected chamber when he went into opposition against Count Stephen Tisza, the aristocratic premier who numbered amongst his bitter hates Serbia and the Prince Ferdinand, whose assassination was the match that set Europe on fire in 1914. Tisza fought a duel with Karolyi, as well as with others, with swords and both were injured, but later with soldiers the proud dictator administered a thrashing to Karolyi on the floor of the chamber. „ It was just at this time that the wealthy young man definitely turned radical, joining hands with Oscar Jaszi, who was the leader of the Young Hungary Party. He was the soul of the opposition, fighting hard against Tisza’s anti-Serbian measures and against the alliances with Germany, which he saw would lead Hungary ihto war. Karolyi got into touch with Paris and Petrograd, taking the tremendous risk of treating with the Russians who were the hereditary foes of his countrymen. But Karolyi never troubled about risks. In the spring of 1914 the first advances were made toward the Entente. Karolyi went to America and there preached the cause of Hungarian democracy.

When the war broke out he was .in midocean. He was detained in France but was permitted to proceed to Hungary as a man who would be a hindrance rather than a help to the Dual Empire at that stage. From the moment of his arrival in Budapest, Karolyi conducted a passionate antiwar campaign arguing that defeat by the Allies would mean dismemberment and victory would result is absorption by Prussia. When the Germans were moving from success to success he could do little more than record his protests, but frpm 1917, when the hopelessness of the Central Powers’ cause was recognised, his power gained and by the summer of 1918 he was the “rising star.” But his enemies including his cousin, Count Emery Karolyi, tried hard to discredit him and assassination was attempted. When the crash came the Emperor Carl wanted to make Karolyi premier, but the ruler’s advisers were against this move and delayed so long that when the appointment did come it was too late, the people openly calling him president of the Hungarian Republic. At the close of October the monarchy was swept aside and Karolyi went into full power. The Allies were hailed with joy, .Wilson was acclaimed as a hero and the dreams of years were attained. But it was too late. Disorganisation at the front and the soldiers were pouring homeward in an undisciplined mob. Karolyi, too, was too late. He opposed the dismemberment measures which took from old Hungary those districts where the Magyars were in a minority and so the Allied support, which might otherwise have been his, waned. The Allies presented their ultimatum and Karolyi, retaining the presidency, called on the Social Democratic Party to form a ministry as the one hope of keeping order in Hungary in face of this demand for the smashing up of the old Hungary. The next day the Bolsheviks took charge, having quietly built up their army, and Karolyi, to save bloodshed, according to his own account of events, remained as President, a figurehead with Bela Kun as the real ruler. The Bolsheviks did not last long and "when they went Karolyi became the hunted of the victorious Whites, with Windischgraetz as one of his warmest foes. He and his wife and children fled on foot at night, pushing their belongings in a little cart, until they crossed the Czecho-Slovakian frontier. He settled in Gablonz and was popular there but he moved to Italy Because one or two attempts were made to assassinate him. He went to Italy but he was asked to leave by Giolitti at the request of Admiral Horthy, who was the Regent in Hungary. - Giolitti before the war had been an ardent supporter of Germany and so would have no love for this violent anti-German Hungarian. Karolyi then obtained as asylum in Jugoslavia and lived with his family in Dalmatia.

Karolyi and his wife, the daughter of Count Julius Andrassy, who was the last Foreign Misister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have lost everything they possessed in the world—the Karolyi estates were con-

fiscated and he is to-day accused of having sold out to both sides. Those who have worked alongside him, however, speak of Karolyi as an idealist, and Professor Oscar Jaszi has said of him: “He trusts people beyond the limits of reason. He h-fis something in him of Dostoevsky’s ‘ldiot,’ so called because he takes principles and men seriously with the naivete of a child. Democracy, socialism, pacificism were for him not political theories, but moral realities tremendous live beings, as it were, persons with whom he maintained some sort of mystic communion. . .” He trusted men so implicitly that he »gave his friendship to some who were notorious as turncoats and who betrayed him easily/ That is why he has sometimes been called the “Pure Fool of Hungary” but it is to be noted that the word “Pure” is used. The vigorous efforts to prevent his wife from entering Americt—she is still a beautiful woman—suggest a revival of the old bitter enmity and perhaps the hand of a Windischgraetz may yet be discovered in this business.