Jew Plucked

A rich Jew came unto judgment, last week at Budapest. Soon he stood, plucked, gasping and stunned, under sentence to pay a fine equivalent to $500,000 and to serve seven years imprisonment at hard labor. What crime could fit so monstrous a punishment?

Six years ago the criminal, Baron Ludwig Havatny, onetime Hungarian Minister of Finance, retired sugar merchant, launched into journalism at Vienna and wrote a series of articles attacking Count Stephen Bethlen, then as now the reactionary Prime Minister of Hungary, but at that time grappling desperately to establish his government. Count Bethlen's was a "White Terror" as opposed to the previous "Red Terror" of Hungarian Communists under the notorious Bela Kun.

Attacks thrust home at such a moment are keenly felt. For six years Count Bethlen's police have been ready to pounce upon Jew Baron Havatny should he unwarily return to anti-Semitic Budapest. Recently he returned, lulled into false security by the technical expiration of the original order for his arrest. Friends of Count Bethlen had, moreover, allegedly assured Baron Havatny that his attacks had been "forgotten." Last week he was arrested on a new warrant, learned that stern, glacial, silent Dictator Count Bethlen does not forget.

Justice Tueroeky, who sentenced the prisoner, calmly ruled out of consideration his many writings of a generally patriotic, pro-Hungarian character. All that mattered was the six-year-old attack upon the present Hungarian regime. For that, vengeance.

Throughout the trial Count Bethlen could curl his thin lips over a telegraphic appeal for mercy despatched to him from Berlin by several authors of world fame who have followed with approval the literary flowering of luckless Baron Havatny. Signers of the telegram included Gerhart Hauptmann (dean of German dramatists), Arthur Schnitzler (smartest of Austrian dramatists) and Sinclair Lewis (now residing in Berlin). They appealed to Count Bethlen: "We turn to you in order to say a word for our personal friend and highly treasured colleague, Baron Havatny. We hope your wisdom will save a man such as Baron Havatny from being sentenced merely because, in other and more confused times than these, he thought and acted other than you think and act. . . ."