Revolution is both contagious and spontaneous in defeat. The news from Vienna was followed by reports of revolution in Hungary. In Budapest laborers plundered the military depots and armed themselves. In Prague the _Prager Haus-Regiment_, No. 28, took charge of the revolution. This was one of the regiments that had been disbanded in 1915 for treachery in the Carpathians. Now it came into its own. Count Michael Karolyi telegraphed on October 31st to the Berlin _Tageblatt_:
"Revolution in Budapest. National Council has taken over the government. Military and police acknowledge National Council completely. Inhabitants rejoicing."
The message was signed by Karolyi as president of the National Council.
The revolution in Bohemia exercised a particularly depressing effect upon loyal Germans because of its outspoken anti-German character. Even in these first days the Czechish newspapers began discussing the division of German territories. The _Vecer_ demanded Vienna as a part of the new Czecho-Slovak state on the ground that a majority of the city's inhabitants or their ancestors originally came from Bohemia and Moravia. The _Narodini Listy_ gave notice that the Germans of Northern Bohemia would not be permitted to join Germany. These were among the more moderate demands made by this press.
"What will the Kaiser do?" asked the Berlin _Vorwärts_ in its leading Article on the last day of October. The article voiced a question which all but the most extreme reactionaries had been asking for two weeks. Even men devoted to the monarch personally and themselves convinced monarchists in principle realized that the only hope of securing a just peace lay in sacrificing Kaiser Wilhelm. Scheidemann, the Socialist Secretary of State, wrote to Chancellor Prince Max, declaring that the Kaiser must retire, and that his letter had been written "in agreement with the leaders of the Socialist party and its representatives in the Reichstag." Up to the time of the publication of the _Vorwärts_ leader the authorities had forbidden any public discussion of the Kaiser's abdication. The censorship restrictions on this subject were now removed and the press was permitted to discuss it freely.
But while many of the party leaders were already inwardly convinced that the supreme sacrifice of abdication must be made by the Kaiser, none of the Empire's political parties except the two Socialist parties considered it politically expedient to make the demand. Even the Progressives, farthest to the left of all the _bourgeois_ parties, not only refused to follow the Socialists' lead, but went on record as opposed to abdication. At a convention of the party in Greater Berlin on November 6th, Dr. Mugdan, one of the party's prominent Reichstag deputies, reporting the attitude of the party on the question of abdication, said: