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supplies for ten days or more. I am now working out a plan to give children in all classes special food rations. I have a Commission to equalise prices, and a Commission to standardise co-operation centres, so that each person will have one place to get food, and thus queues will be abolished. My aim is to make the whole country one co-operative society, as without the co-operatives the revolution would have been much more difficult.
"With regard to the attitude of Austria in prohibiting food to us, we have always fed Austria, and therefore the advantage is with us, but notwithstanding the fact that we cannot be starved out, we must recognise the necessity of going without things, and therefore desire that economic negotiation be taken up, independently of the peace terms.
HIGHER WAGES BUY FOOD.
"There has been no special searching for hidden foodstuffs, but when houses were searched for arms, the food found was confiscated, although in every case the owner was compensated for its value.
"There is no possibility of lowering prices of food, but wages are so high that the workers can afford to buy it. Although the blockade has been largely raised from Austria, the prices here are cheaper. Our problem is to get the food from the country to the city."
Jeno Hamburger, People's Commissary for Agriculture, had already begun to organize the great Hungarian estates along communistic lines under the Karolyi Government. He is an organizer of long experience, and showed me charts of typical counties in Hungary demonstrating that formerly about thirty persons owned seventy-five per cent, of the land. I also saw charts, illustrating his method of organizing such counties for production and distribtion of food. From the Federal centre of Budapest ho appoints county superintendents, who in turn divide the county and appoint district superintendents. These district chiefs sub-divide their districts into inspection districts each with a chief inspector who controls the individual and local co-operative societies, which actually sell the food to the individual buyer. These local co-operative guilds have already begun to cultivate twelve million acres of unproductive land in
