Hungary belongs to the group of countries that entered on the process of industrialization at a relatively late date. It is true that, prior to the second World War, Hungary for two decades profited from its system of protective customs; yet the social structure of the country and the political attitude of the ruling classes discouraged rapid industrialization and put a brake on it even where the generally unfavourable circumstances that hindered or retarded development between the two World Wars might still have provided an opportunity to boost industrialization. The dominant classes made every effort to maintain the agrarian character of the country, and this conservative trend found support in the peculiar situation existing in Europe and in world economy. This support was political in the sense that the counter-revolutionary system of 1919 had -in the eyes of the West-European countries -adequately mastered the revolutionary waves by applying a method for choking revolutionary movements that had proved its value ever since the revolt in the Vend6e, viz., to submerge the towns -and with them industry as well-in the sea of the peasantry. Already in the 17th century, during the English civil war, it was almost a matter of course that the royalists, the followers of King Charles I, tried to mobilize the countryside against the towns -the instigators of revolution. The conservative-agrarian orientation in Hungary, however, also relied on such unforeseen factors as the hitherto greatest recession of world economy, on Europe's disintegration, and on the spread of doctrines that anathematized the very concept of "progress" and rendered its elements meaningless. It is, indeed, a tragic turn of history that Hungary's political system and economic endeavours became synchronized with Europe in the thirties at a time when European progress had gone into reverse gear. Hungary's masterminds and visionaries cherished the hope that by catching up with Europe they could overcome all the failures resulting from the fact that the country's independence had been interrupted for four centuries, a