Free They Were Found Wanting by Miklós Bánffy Page B

sent in his name as a speaker in the debate.
    When Balint rose the House was half empty, probably because he was unknown and owed allegiance to no party. This last was important because each party always ensured that there was an audience for its own members, who would be encouraged with applause and loudly vocal support. But a member who belonged to no party, who had no declared policies, was heard only by those few enthusiasts who would listen to anything and everything , and, of course, by the Ministers whose motions were the subject of debate.
    And so it turned out that while Abady was speaking there had only been a bare ten or fifteen of the majority party members present in the Chamber. Only the minority listened carefully to what he had to say; and sitting at the end of the minority bench was the lawyer, Aurel Timisan, who had been one of the defendants in the Memorandum Trial.
    Balint spoke about the carefully planned and politically motivated policy of agricultural loans which the Romanian-owned banks, under the leadership of the Union Bank, pursued among the peasants in the central plain and mountains of Transylvania. Certain persons in the confidence of the bank would receive cheap loans and they, in turn, would lend this to the Romanian peasantry through intermediaries. With each transaction the loan would get more and more expensive until the peasant borrowers would find themselves paying staggeringly high usury rates.
    ‘I know cases,’ he said, ‘where the original twenty-five or thirty per cent has risen to two or three hundred per cent. Of course no debtor can cope with such sums. When compound interest is added to the loan the debt soon exceeds the borrower’s assets and he is forced to go bankrupt. The bailiffs are sent in, the lenders foreclose and the land passes into the hands of those “men of confidence ”. The peasant proprietor is ruined and the best he can hope for is to become a tied worker on what used to be his own land. There are thus two major effects: human rights are violated and political resentment is fostered. And who are these “men of confidence”? They are the Hungarian notary, the Hungarian bailiff , and the Hungarian judge. All the poor Romanian peasant can grasp is that the very men who should be his protectors against injustice are the same men who enforce that injustice! Can anyone wonder that he considers these men as much his enemies as their intermediaries who have furnished these monstrous loans? Can anyone wonder at the sense of injustice felt by the hard-pressed borrower and the dispossessed small farmer when at the mercy of the very men whose authority they are forced to accept? This state of things is endemic in the poorer regions. It is a carefully planned operation which is swiftly moving our under-privileged minorities into dependency while at the same time building up rich and powerful estates who owe their existence to Romania.’
    The House listened in bored indifference until Balint had felt that everything he was saying was futile and devoid of interest or significance. He also had an uneasy feeling that he was not presenting his case sufficiently well, that his voice was monotonous, his manner dull. Only the Romanian members paid any attention and they, shrugging their shoulders at everything he said, showed clearly that they did not believe a word of it, that it was all untrue and the product of an overworked imagination.
    Of all his hearers, only old Timisan gave the impression of really listening to what Balint said. He leant forward, one hand cupped to an ear, clearly intent on not missing a word. Under his bushy white eyebrows his watching eyes were full of suspicion as he took in every sentence. He was waiting to see if Balint would mention his name.
    The reason for this was that Timisan had been the man from whom Balint had learned all about the Romanian bank’s carefully laid plans, about the systematic policy they had been employing. This had been