Page:Alice Riggs Hunt - Facts About Communist Hungary (1919).djvu/23

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

19

centres for food. This food must be distributed justly, but now the bourgeoisie have time and money to go to the country to buy up the food. Unproductive people must go to the country to work!" Yells of approval and a commotion for over five minutes greeted this statement.

Tho Food Commissary reproved the members who shouted that food was not being distributed adequately, by stating that the proletarians were doing as much smuggling of food from the country as the bourgeois, and that they must not expect the Government to accomplish more than any other country in Europe had been able to bring about, namely the immediate control of an adequate food supply. Upon his statement that he had been working in the Socialist movement for twenty-five years, many of tho young soldier members shouted: "That is long enough to make you a bourgeois."

FOOD DISTRIBUTING CENTRES.

Mor Erderlyi—People's Commissary for Food Supply, told me that his first task was to district the distributing centres for food, and then to get the food from the country. "There is plenty of food in the villages," he said "but owing to the fact that transportation is not yet organized, the supplies are not brought in. The villages want salt, sugar and other things, which could be exchanged for agricultural implements. We do not expect to use force to persuade the villagers to give up their food, but we want to do it by exchange and propaganda. Just now we are gaining many cattle through the advance of our troops in the livestock district. The plains which are not occupied by the enemy have been practically devastated of cattle owing to the shortage of vegetables and the necessity of using up the meat.

"The rationing is very strict. There is no thought of starving the bourgeoisie, but we want to improve the bad system of food distribution which obtained under the Hapsburgs when there were red food cards for the value of four hundred crowns, and green food cards for less, which gave the workers less food. We give the heavy manual workers the highest rations, and have divided the people into three categories. (A) Heavy manual workers, (B) Brain and intellectual workers, (C) All classes not included in the foregoing. They will get