Once is enough," says Budapest. "We shall never go Bolshevist again." When one listens to the stories of what happened while Hungary was under the heel of Bela Kuhn, his only wonder is that once was not too much. The first man to give me an inside picture was the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian; his mother had been thrown out of a fourth storey window by the pillaging rabble who visited her home. The second was Hungary's greatest iron-master, who crouched with his wife and daughter in an unlighted cupboard during the entire regime of terror. But though Hungary is sincerely repentant and, as an actual fact, less likely than Great Britain or America ever to go Bolshevist, the indiscreet experiment of two years ago has created a prejudice. The need of Hungary is as pressing as that of any Central European country, but a quite insignificant amount of relief work is being done. There has been no feeding of children since last August, when the funds allotted for that purpose gave out. The American Relief Administration is planning to renew its activities immediately; but the neutral countries, which have carried on such fine work in other famished areas, have done next to nothing for Hungary. Yet Hungary's claims are in many respects more urgent. It has suffered from the war. It has suffered from the Peace Treaty, which has given away to Roumania and Czecko-Slovakia its best wheat-lands and all its important sources of fuel. It has suffered from Bela Kuhn. Last of all and most recent, it has suffered from the Roumanian invasion, which resulted not only in theft on a wholesale scale, but also in the most senseless destruction. From all these causes the country is filled with refugees and naturally the children are the chief sufferers. There are two refugee universities in Budapest, which have taken up their headquarters in old tobacco-factories. When I say refugee universities, I mean literally seats of learning like Yale and Harvard which have transplanted themselves entire, with professors and students and now have no visible means of support.

There are over 40,000 people living in freight-cars in the railroad yards in and around the city. They lack every means of sanitation. Epidemics are continually springing up among them which threaten to spread throughout the country. At the present moment measles and scarlet fever are rife. There is no means of ventilating a freight-car, except by letting in the cold, and no means of heating it, except by keeping the doors shut and stifling. I visited the freight-car dwellers today and was notified of their presence by a smell not unlike an open sewer. Men, women, and children lay dying in those boxes, while the living slept beside them. There was no attempt at decency. Decency is a weak word. All sense of elementary cleanliness was forgotten. Here women bore children in the publicity of their families and all the intimate details of married life were witnessed by the most innocent and the youngest. The freight-cars of Budapest are not a series of homes, but an itinerant jungle. When the smell becomes too obnoxious in one spot, they are hauled to another. The fate of their occupants is nobody's business; they are left to die.

But these people form only a minute fraction of the sum total of misery. There are upwards of a thousand factories in Budapest and only a hundred of them are in partial operation. Why? The lack of coal. There are no woods in Hungary; it is a land of tillage. Most of the mines were apportioned among other nations. The fields are of little service for food; the Roumanians carried off the seed which was being hoarded for the sowing of the next harvest. The Government hands out ration-cards, designating shops at which the recipients may apply. Queues form early in the morning, but at the end of a long day's waiting the supplies are exhausted. One queue is waiting for fuel, another for milk, another for potatoes. The people who compose them are half-naked; their feet are unshod; the snow is melting; the women carry babies. Can you realize the tragedy at the mid of the day when these people return to their families empty-handed?

Misery is best depicted in individual cases. I went to a maternity hospital, where devoted Hungarian women are working without thought of reward to save the lives of the unborn. They have no bed-linen, no medicines, few instruments. The establishment could be run at a cost of two hundred dollars a month—less than the cost of a woman's dress on Fifth Avenue. If the next two hundred dollars are not forthcoming, in the near future the wards will be closed. As it is they are so crowded that a mother can only be cared for for ten days.

As an adjunct to the hospital they have a preventive department, into which they gather the young girls who would become mothers if they were allowed to run at large. It sounds incredible, but girls are so hungry in Budapest that they will sell their souls to the first comer for a hunk of bread. These girls are collected by the department I have mentioned and are taught to make lace. When I was there today the thread had given out and no more was obtainable. They make their lace for two dollars for eleven yards; in America it would be worth at least two dollars for one yard. As a mere business undertaking it would pay some firm to send the thread from America and purchase the product.

I went to see the homes from which these girl-children came. There is a section of Budapest called Tivoli—why I do not know. It consists of old factories, now stripped and empty. In these buildings the utterly forlorn have taken up their abode.

I wish instead of writing, I could cut down the distance that separates me from America. Then I could bring you by automobile to see for yourselves. A glance would be enough. You would not be able to rest till these wrongs had been righted.

The roads which lead up to Tivoli are mud.

The place is avoided as a contagion. In many of the homes only one member of the family is able to appear at a time—the rest are naked. If they possess a bed, it has nothing but a mattress and the mattress has been slit so that they may crawl in among its straw for covering. As a rule the bed is the only piece of furniture; all the rest has either been sold or broken up for fuel. Everything that will burn has vanished from the landscape—palings, posts, everything. One pushes open a door—not one door, but a thousand; the same sight meets the eyes. There's a mother gaunt with famine, a bare room, an evil odour, a baby thrust into the mattress, boys and girls in rags, almost naked, and a few rotten potatoes lying jumbled on the floor. Of any other kind of food there's not a sign. The moment you appear they start to crawl towards you, hailing you as a deliverer. Any face that is new and unexpected serves to spur their desperate hope. They weep and try to kiss your hands, cringing indecently like animals.

Don't run away with the idea that these people are the scum of the earth; before the war they were as respectable as you or I.

Take the case of Mrs. Richa. She lives in one room with seven children, all of whom are tubercular. Yesterday the room had yet another occupant, but I arrived too late to see him—this morning he died. He lay in one corner, a little apart from the living and, seeing that he would not usurp it long, he was allowed to have the mattress. This other occupant was Private Richa, the husband of Mrs. Richa and the father of the seven children. He had caught his disease in the winter campaigns against the Russians—consumption. His youngest child—a baby not yet two—was stark naked. The room was bare of everything. None of them had been fed for two days. There was snow outside. When one considers the situation placidly, Private Richa has done rather better than his family.

Or take the case of Mrs. Schwartz. She and her husband had been in a prosperous way and had owned a thriving store. At that time they had had four children. When Hungary was invaded, the Cossacks burnt the store and cut her husband slowly to pieces before her eyes. The result of this is that the youngest child is deaf, dumb and imbecile. In her flight between the retreating and invading armies, two of her children died. She arrived in Budapest like thousands of others, friendless and penniless. Year by year, dragging out the agony, she has starved. When we visited her she was on her last legs—she could scarcely rise.

These cases can be enumerated endlessly till the sheer weight of their tragedy kills their drama. But the question is what are we going to do about it? Are we going to let millions of human beings die like rats in a hole? Are we going to let the children of Hungary perish? They at least should be saved.