At this moment the heads of the Romanian church handed in a protest memorandum demanding that Apponyi should pass it on to the King. This last action made it clear that discussions on Apponyi’s motion would lead to the reopening of the Romanian question since, of the 25-strong minorities group in Parliament, only three were not Romanians.

On April 4th, Polit, the leader of the minorities group, had presented his own deposition and he was followed only by Romanian members who all made lengthy speeches. This policy had been decided upon as their numbers were insufficient to insist upon endless vote-taking, the classic method of stopping or delaying parliamentary business. Instead they embarked on a policy of talking out the debates with speeches lasting several hours, speeches which often consisted largely of reading out lengthy extracts from previous debates and pleadings, until the rest of the House, the majority, was dying of ennui.

There had been the occasional lively moment when some government member would shout out some colourful phrase or slogan – as they had in the past, when in opposition, inveighing against that ‘cursed Vienna’ – though now their invective was directed at the cursed minorities. Discussion raged one day when government members read in their newspapers that during the previous day’s debate the Romanian Vaida had read out a poem defamatory of Hungarians which no one, not even the shorthand recorders, had even noticed, so general had been the boredom.

The debate was not really taken seriously until one day Istvan Bethlen made his first speech. Until then, though everyone knew that Bethlen was one of the leading figures in Apponyi’s section of the Independence Party, he had worked almost exclusively in committees. When it was known that he was to speak the House suddenly began to fill up until not a seat was empty. They were rewarded by a most powerful intervention, hard-hitting and aggressive, which instantly transformed the farce of the previous proceedings into a serious battle on more fundamental issues than had until then been discussed.

Bethlen, ignoring the petty matters of school laws, went straight to the heart of the whole problem of the large Romanian minorities who, of course, actually formed a majority of the population in the province of Transylvania. This had the shock effect of bringing out into the open what everyone had until then refused to discuss. At once there were accusations of chauvinism, of disloyal contacts in Bucharest, and hotly contested statements about the increasing power and influence of the minorities. From that moment on the Romanian members found themselves on the defensive.

Abady had now felt that the time had come for him to speak up too. He had realized that he might not be able to say anything that was new, interesting, or previously unknown but he had felt nevertheless that he should now rise and say what he thought. Accordingly he had set to work to prepare himself and when he had gathered his material together he 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”.