[54] Francis Gribble in The Nineteenth Century, vol. 82 (2), pp. 883-884.
[55] Declaration of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, Sept. 19, 1918, cited from the Journal des Débats, weekly edition, Oct. 25, 1918.
[56] The Hungarian census of 1910 claimed that the Magyars in the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen numbered 10,050,575.
VII
HUNGARY AND THE ADRIATIC
Among all the states of Europe there are few which, from the historical, the geographic, or the economic point of view, might appear to have a better claim to existence than the thousand-year-old kingdom of Hungary. Nature would seem to have marked out for political unity this Pannonian basin, with its marvellously fertile plain of the Alföld in the centre, surrounded on almost every side by mountain walls and mineral-bearing highlands, with its roads and rivers all converging towards the great Danube waterway, and its various parts supplementing each other economically in so admirable a fashion. And here, for once, history and geography did not seem to be working at cross-purposes. Ever since the appearance of those gifted and valiant Asiatics, the Magyars, in the Danubian plain in the ninth century, the Pannonian basin has been united into a state which has shown a remarkable vitality and durability, and whose frontiers, in spite of some temporary fluctuations, have on the whole remained singularly unchanged. If ancient status of possession, economic cohesion, and what may be called the geographic fitness of things, were all the factors that need be taken into account, the Hungarian state, in spite of all its misdeeds, ought to have come through the World War intact. Unfortunately for it, however, there is another factor which counts for even more nowadays: the rights and aspirations of peoples.
Hungary has always been a polyglot state. The ruling race, the Magyars, a nation of mixed Finno-Ugrian and Turko-Tartar stock, are a people of the plains like their nomad ancestors. They are said to have a positive aversion for living more than 600 feet above sea level. Hence, except for a few scattered colonies, they have always remained quartered in the plain of the Alföld, leaving the peripheral highlands and the once swampy regions of the south to other races, whom they probably found in the country at the time of their arrival and whose numbers have certainly been increased by subsequent immigration. The Magyars are an island of Asiatics surrounded by a sea of Latins and Slavs.
This ruling race is probably only a minority of the total population. The earliest census of nationalities that we have and the only one that was taken by relatively impartial officials, the census of 1851, makes out the Magyars to be only 37% of the total population. It is true that since the Magyars have taken the census into their own hands, their percentage has risen steadily with each successive decade, until by 1900 they could claim a slight majority, and in 1910 they could boast of 54%. In this latter year they were reckoned at just ten millions, out of a population of eighteen millions for Hungary proper. Their astonishing gains at the expense of the other races were officially explained as due to “the peaceful propagation of Hungarian culture.” Of that “peaceful propagation” I shall speak in a moment; but it should be said here that scarcely any unprejudiced observer accepts Hungarian racial statistics at their face value, and that a more probable estimate would reduce the number of the Magyars to about eight millions. This would make them a minority even in Hungary proper, and much more so in the whole kingdom—i. e., with Croatia included—which had a population of twenty-one millions in 1910.
Among the subject races, the Roumanians probably numbered three to three and a half millions; the Slovaks two to three millions; the Ruthenians half a million; the Serbs and Croats three millions; the Germans two millions.
Like every other racially composite state, Hungary was placed before the gravest of problems by the nineteenth century revival of the submerged or long dormant nationalities. During the early and middle part of that century, this problem could seldom be seriously faced by the Magyars, for they were engaged in their own battle for constitutional rights against the despotic and centralizing policy of Vienna. In this struggle they displayed a vigor and a tenacity which won for them both the sympathy and admiration of the world and a reputation as liberals and democrats which they have since singularly belied. As soon as their victory over the imperial government was sealed by the Compromise of 1867, as soon as they found themselves masters in Transleithania, the Magyars set to work to deny to the other races of the kingdom all those liberties for which they themselves had been fighting. The programme, henceforth pursued with the most relentless rigor and the most unscrupulous methods, was to ‘assure the unity of the Hungarian State’ by Magyarizing the subject races.
One must not be taken in by such mere stage decorations as the Hungarian law of nationalities of 1868—in appearance the most generous measure that could be devised, but never put into practice; nor by the glib phrases of Magyar propagandists about the unparallelled freedom that existed in Hungary, and the zeal with which the government fostered the languages and culture of the non-Magyar races. Anything more insolently defiant of the truth could scarcely be imagined. What has really gone on in Hungary in the past fifty years—what “the peaceful propagation of Magyar culture” meant—is something not easy to condense into a few words. In the briefest summary, however, it includes: