Budapest is a handsome city with grand bridges spanning the bending Danube. The fashionable part climbs upwards on crags to the higher light, and the Danube flashes upward. The modern city is a first-class aggregation of business houses, cafés, and places of pleasure. There is pavement comfort. The people are well dressed, despite losses and troubles. The smooth pates of business men abound, and the knobbly skulls of the Balkans are fewer. The women are in fashion, and as in the rest of Central and Western Europe, wear bunches of artificial grapes hanging from one side of their hats. You see no grapes and hanging ribbons in Belgrade and Sofia. They will come there next year or in 1923. The Hungarian women are broad-faced and broad-bosomed, and talk more than they smile. City madam in elegant attire with languorous half-shut eyes and Hungarian drawl is a man's darling. Flesh-coloured stockings greatly abound. One is, however, strongly advised not to judge of Hungary by the people who spend four or five hours of the day sitting in the cafés of Budapest. The poor parts of the city present a different spectacle. Here there are great numbers of crooked-legged spindly children, war-products evidently. The slums are nothing like so bad as those of London or Chicago—only the children are less boisterous, less vital, and seem to have been underfed all their lives. The new babies look much better than the children of four or five. Food is more abundant now, and a great deal of relief work is done at the schools. But it is doubtful if any philanthropic efforts can restore the war-children. Budapest has a bad streak left in her town-population by the war, and it is visible. Cotton goods are very expensive, and many of the poor children seem inadequately dressed. The price of cotton is dependent upon much speculation and bad business between the American cotton plantation and the obscure worker in Hungary. It is a curious anomaly that Americans should burn cotton-bales in the Southern States to keep up the price, and that the American Red Cross on the other hand should in Europe distribute free garments to those who cannot pay the world-price thus attained.

The exchange is very low, five crowns to a penny, three hundred to a dollar. For a thousand crowns a week you can live—you can live in one room and keep body and soul together. For two thousand crowns a week you can live at a second-class hotel with board and lodging. An ordinary dinner with a glass of beer costs a hundred crowns. You can also get a seat at the back of the stalls in a theatre for that amount. There is a luxury-tax of ten per cent on all you buy at cafés and restaurants, on perfumery, and like objects. This, no doubt, brings in a large amount to the national exchequer if it is efficiently collected. The wages and salaries of all trades and professions are in a continual hurdle-race, vaulting cost of living and the rate of exchange. There are thousands of nouveaux riches, and there are thousands of ex-rich and gentry in decay. One feels that Hungary, however, is a rich country even as she stands to-day, and that the people have sterling qualities which make for the recuperation of the new State. There is still a love of work in the country, and that is comparatively a rare virtue in modern Europe. The working class, as in Germany, feels that it lost the war and cannot expect extra fine conditions. The Hungarian working man outworks and therefore undersells or can undersell the English working man. The nation whose working men are ready to do most work is the most fortunate in 1921. If Hungary can avoid indemnities and export taxes she is likely to do well. The Government will no doubt undergo many changes, and most people believe that the King is bound to come back. By popular vote he probably would—just as Constantine did in the Greek elections. But external opposition is too great. If Czechs and Serbs quarrelled it would be different. International animosity and the general ill-will militate most against the peaceful development of the new Hungary.

Budapest no doubt will always win friends for the country of which it is the capital. Capitals can be of enormous service to states in the matter of silent propaganda. A handsome comfortable city of impressive buildings will always predispose foreigners in favour of the country itself. On the other hand, an inadequate capital will be a hindrance to a state. In this respect, Belgrade, as it is to-day, is a handicap to Jugo-Slavia. But Budapest will help Hungary enormously.

What a glamour there is upon Budapest in the evening, with myriads of lights on each side of the gliding Danube. Formerly one arrived under the grand bridges in a house-boat at night and came alongside the stone quays, and without passports or customs walked up into one of the gayest and brightest cities of Europe. But now the Danube, mother of mighty countries, is enchanted and enthralled. When will she be disenchanted again?

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

VIII. FROM VIENNA

At Budapest you begin to suspect that you are in Europe; at Vienna you are sure of it—with its great array of fine shops, full of elegancies and delectable grandeur which leave Paris and New York in the shade. The whole press of Europe seems to have "written up" Vienna as "the ruined city" and "the end of a great capital," and even at Constantinople where terrible affliction was constantly before the eyes, the fiction held that Vienna was even worse. You are, therefore agreeably surprised to find the wheels of modern civilization running smoothly—a well-dressed, easy-going people on the streets and in the cafés, every business house working to full capacity, and all at first glance going well. The children, and especially those of the working class, look healthy and full of life. Starving Vienna seems somewhat of a myth.

Vienna is not like Petrograd where the thousands of eyes of the Nevski Prospect have been put out and squads of dead shops stare at one from smashed windows and gutted interiors. And it is not a vast caravanserai for sufferers like Constantinople. Something, however, is wrong and has been wrong and will be worse, and this something has power to strike the imagination of every one who visits the great city of Vienna. It is perhaps the contrast of luxury on the one hand and black bread on the other, and the almost fabulous descent of the crown. Wrangel's officers use hundred-rouble notes for shaving-papers, and Americans in Vienna behave as unceremoniously with crowns. The lower denominations of the rouble are much cheaper than the price of paper, and the Austrian crown is going that way.[1]

This depreciation of the currency strikes the mind of the visitor to Vienna, and from it he deduces the general ruin of the country. He sees the shabby condition into which imperial palaces and State houses are falling, and talks with the aristocratic or cultured nouveau pauvre carrying his lunch of sausage and black bread to a gloomy apartment at the back of a fourth floor, and he feels the calamity that has fallen upon Austria. Austria with a nominal 2800 crowns to the pound sterling cannot last. How then about Poland with 4000 marks to the pound—an Allied country with a close understanding with France? But nobody in Vienna can understand how Poland lives.

The true inwardness of Vienna's calamity seems to lie in the fact that she is the capital of a very badly governed country. Much could obviously be done in little Austria by an honest, intelligent, and industrious administrative staff. But they prefer to stand in the way and beg, the giant Vienna and the dwarf Austria, staggering the imagination of pilgrims, and whining for alms to passers-by.