APPONYI, Albert, COUNT, Hungarian statesman : b. 1846. He is the son of the Count George Apponyi (q.v.) leader of the Con servative party that opposed the revolutionary movement of 1848, and one time Chief Justice of Hungary. Count Albert was educated at the universities of Vienna and Budapest, en tered Parliament in 1872 and became the leader of the Conservative National party. He joined the Liberals in 1899, was elected Presi dent of the Reichstag in 1901, Speaker of the Chamber 1902-04. Seceding from the Liberal party, he reorganized the National party in 1904, and was Minister of Public Education from 1906 to 1910. Beyond these few years of office, he spent nearly the whole of his parliamentary career in opposition. Together with Andrassy he led the coalition which drove Count Stephen Tisza, the pro-German °Iron Man' from office in 1905. As a delegate to the World Peace Conference at Saint Louis he visited the United States in 1904. He made another trip to this country in 1911, when he delivered some lectures on International Peace. Count Apponyi is undoubtedly the greatest figure in Hungarian politics, an orator, statesman and born leader of men. His re markable eloquence is of the soothing yet compelling type; in some of the stormy scenes enacted in the Hungarian Parliament, when strong words, ink-bottles and fisticuffs rent the air, the masterful presence and digni fied language of Count Apponyi rarely failed to restore peace and order. Intensely patriotic
and absolutely honest, he can hardly be said to have found adequate opportunities to test his administrative abilities. His real strength lies in opposition, to rouse men to lofty ideals and to create enthusiasm. He is a voluminous writer and a clever linguist, able to °switch off' into half-a-dozen languages with astonish ing ease. Though his political career has been many-sided, abounding in fluctuations and party vacillations, the purity of his life and motives has never been challenged. Like his colleague Count Andrassy, he has contributed numerous articles, mainly on questions of Hungarian public law, in native and foreign magazines. He published ()Esthetics and Politics: the Artist and the Statesman) (1905), and (A brief sketch of the Hungarian Con stitution and of the relation between Austria and Hungary' (1908).