the balance of power? At all events, Friedrich and his Huszar might not even temporarily have seized power had it not been for the Roumanian army. Hence, it is clear that, when discussing the fate of the Soviet Government in Hungary, it is necessary to take account of the “balance of power,” at all events in two countries – in Hungary itself, and in its neighbor, Roumania. But it is not difficult to grasp that we cannot stop at this. If the dictatorship of the Soviets had been set up in Austria before the maturing of the Hungarian crisis, the overthrow of the Soviet regime in Budapest would have been an infinitely mere difficult task. Consequently, we have to include Austria also, together with the treacherous policy of Friedrick Adler, in that balance of power which determined the temporary fall of the Soviet Government in Hungary.
Friedrich Adler himself, however, seeks the key to the balance of power, not in Russia and Hungary, but in the West, in the countries of Clemenceau and Lloyd George. They have in their hands bread and coal – and really bread and coal, especially in our time, are just as foremost factors in the mechanism of the balance of power as cannon in the constitution of Lassalle. Brought down from the heights, Adler’s idea consists, consequently, in this: that the Austrian proletariat must not seize power until such time as it is permitted to do so by Clemenceau (or Millerand, i.e., a Clemenceau of the second order).
However, even here it is permissible to ask: Does the policy of Clemenceau himself really correspond to the balance of power? At the first glance it may appear that it corresponds well enough, and, if it cannot be proved, it is, at least, guaranteed by Clemenceau’s gendarmes, who break up working-class meetings, and arrest and shoot Communists. But here we cannot but remember that the terrorist measures of the Soviet Government – that is, the same searches, arrests, and executions, only directed against the counter-revolutionaries – are considered by some people as a proof that the Soviet Government does