The Hattiesburg News

HUNGARY AND THE WAR.
While the Central Empires have agreed to make no separate peace, as have also the Allies, the movement in Hungary for a separate settlement of the war is of high significance. For one thing it again advertises to the world that while Germany in the war acts as a unit, no such state of things, except in a narrow military sense, exists in Austro-Hungary, where the several nationalities and hostile races are held in a loose dynastic bond that the war is putting to a great strain. And of all the separate political entities Hungary, by reason of its racial and historical importance, is the one section to which the enforced identity of its interests with those of Austria has proved the most galling and most disastrous. Largely held in relationship through the Hapsburg family's claims as rulers of Hungary, it is inconceivable that the two sections of the empire will survive the war with any desire to continue the present haphazard union. Karolyi and the peace party he is forming in Hungary, therefore, are historically right in viewing the interests of Hungary as wholly different from those of German Austria and Germany proper, for both of whom there is neither liking nor respect nor reverence among the Magyars. Under the circumstances the Hungarian peace party is not likely to accomplish much now, but after the war they will be found undoubtedly acting for an independent Hungary, which is surely on the card if anything is certain when the grand break-up comes.