Many of them still hadn't realized how serious the situation was. They continued to fantasize that their lives could go on as before, and paid no attention at all to the problems facing Austria or Hungary.
Some in the country were preparing for war, some watched coldly from the sidelines, and the rest had no idea what was going on. In this bizarre state, the country was rushing toward madness.
Still, the Hungarians had achieved something over the years: they had built a railway thirty kilometers long.
But because they didn't produce enough pig iron, they had imported some from Austria, along with a full set of equipment, including locomotives.
It wasn't that the Hungarians wanted to use Austrian equipment. They simply couldn't produce their own, and equipment from other countries was either impossible to transport or exorbitantly expensive—and still performed poorly.
So they had no choice but to use Austrian goods. This drew protests from Hungarian nationalists, who even threatened to tear up the railway.
Petofi, however, saw things differently. He had been to Vienna and knew the power of railways and machinery, so he praised the project wholeheartedly.
"The train is astonishingly fast! Every one of you should try it!
I wish I could put our homeland on a train, too. Perhaps that would make up for the centuries we've lost."
Petofi's poems were still extremely sharp. He despised the nobles and landowners who clung to their old ways, and he had just as little regard for shortsighted capitalists.
"We race onward without stopping for a moment. Are we tired?
Not at all!
The train carries us ever forward,
taking us into another, new world.
Build railways! Build railways!
Build a thousand! Build ten thousand!
Let them spread across the whole world,
like veins!
Why not build railways?