Papers and Documents relating to the Foreign Relations of Hungary, Volume 1, 1919–1920 (Budapest, 1939)

Appendix III. Parliamentary debates

968 for us to cooperate — suggested to many of us the desperate stubborn thought that instead of becoming separated from those who are more unlucky than we are, we should rather go with them than submit to a complete division ... We should do rather as Poland did than to accept the fate of that country. But though this thought, prompted by noble feeling, is entirely natural, we must not consider it one which may be carried out

... We must survive because we are — not that I wish to minimize even in the slightest the sufferings of the Polish nation which lasted for centuries — but we would be in an even more desperate situation for we are not surrounded by major powers and this would mean more than mere division. (Commotion.) The Hungarian nation has always been great in hours of calamity. (Approval.) When there was no calamity, there was quarreling aplenty: not that there was none in misfortune as well but in the final issue it always managed to be great. I believe that we can and will be great at this time also as befits a nation which has a venerable historic perspective and which, therefore, will be able to find its great historic perspective in the future as well. . . We, I believe, can prove this — and in no other way can we do so by than adopting as the basis of our attitude the will to live and not by begging for our life. (General approval and applause.) . . . The Peace Delegation which was led by the great son and patriarch of our nation was able to preserve the dignity of the nation. (Acclamations. „Hail Apponyi!" Cheers and applause on every side of the House.) It stood there not as one who begs for the life of its country but as one who deserves life and knows that she will live because, even if she has lost much, her culture, her moral and national assets, have remained. By preserving these, we shall always find the road, however long it may be, to bring this nation again to the place it achieved after Mohi

1 and Mohács:

2 for I cannot liken this time to any other but those. I repeat: the powers of justice and nature will break through, fairly soon, because there will be numerous questions which the various commissions and agencies will solve not according to the bleak and often vague paragraphs of the peace treaty but guided by a sane mind by nature. (Approval.) Here are — I pick at random a few minor questions for it would require too much time to enumerate everything — but here are the questions of four branch railroad lines, the problems of fourteen flood preventive cooperatives, the divi1 Decisive battle lost against the Tartars in 1241. 2 See p. 953. nore 1.