"The Liberal press and the 'indignation meetings' of Italy have been alternatively severe and sarcastic upon entente cordiale between the Vatican and the Seraglio. But the Papal logic is clear and sound. It says, 'The reverence of Constantine for the Keys transferred the seat of civil empire to the Byzantium, whereas Anti-Christ Russia founded the pseudo-throne of Saint Peter in the far north. We fought against the Moslem when he was an aggressor. Innocent XI., not to mention the crusader-Popes, preached the liberation of Vienna. Pius I. worked up to the Battle of Lepanto. But things are now changed. You, Bulgarian and Bosnian Catholics, have religious liberty, and you will have political liberty when you deserve it! Meanwhile, obey the Sultan, who has nothing to do with Christianity, and shun Anti-Christ—the Czar.' Good logic, I say, cold and clear-drawn; but powerless to purge away the sentiments, the prejudices, and the passions of mankind.
"Italy drives the coach too fast. Patriotic Italians declare that England has no right to hold Malta. Cyprus was under Venice; ergo, they think it should be under Italy. The Trentine, the Southern Tyrol, Istria, and Dalmatia, are in the same conditions. The Latin kingdom has achieved a great position in Japan. She sends her travellers to explore New Guinea. She aims at being the most favoured nation in Egypt, where she lately received a severe schiaffo. The Italian national expedition landed in the dominions of the Khedive without having had the decency to call upon him in Cairo. You know how the Egyptian noticed the affront. Finally, she talks of herself as one of the Powers, ready to occupy the insurgent districts which the Porte cannot reduce. Such is the actual standpoint of United Italy.
"I will now sketch the state of Hungary, whose ambition threatens to make her aggressive, entitled, by the press of England, the 'backbone of the Austrian monarchy;' and praised for the 'superior political organization' with which she has crushed her Slav rivals.
"Since the days, now forgotten, when Prince Esterhazy first flashed, in London society, his diamond jacket upon the dazzled eyes of the 'upper ten thousand,' the name of Hungarian has been a passport to favour amongst us. We meet him in the shape of a Kinsky, an Erdŏdy, or a Hunyadi,—well born, well clad, and somewhat unlearned, except in the matter of modern languages. But he is a good rider, a keen sportsman, and a cool player for high stakes—qualities in one point (only) much resembling Charity. He looks like a gentleman in a drawing-room and in the hunting-field; he is quite at home at a fancy ball; he wears his frogged jacket, his tights and his tall boots, his silks, satins, and furs, with an air; his manners are courteous, cordial, and pleasant; in money matters he has none of the closeness of the cantankerous Prussian, none of the meanness of the Italian; and, lastly, he makes no secret of his sympathy with England, with the English, and with all their constitution-manias. What can you want more? You pronounce him a nice fellow, and all, woman especially, re-echo your words, 'He is such a gentleman!' and—he received the Prince of Wales so enthusiastically!
"But there is another side (politically speaking) to this fair point of view. The Hungarian is a Tartar with a coat of veneer and varnish. Hungary is, as regards civilization, simply the most backward country in Europe. Buda-Pest is almost purely German, the work of the Teutons, who, at the capital, do all the work; you hardly ever hear in the streets a word of Magyar, and the Magyars have only managed to raise its prices and its death-rate to somewhat double those of London. The cities, like historic Gran on the Danube, have attempts at public buildings and streets; in the country towns and villages the thoroughfares are left to Nature; the houses and huts, the rookeries and doggeries are planted higgledy-piggledy, wherever the tenants please; and they are filthier than any shanty in Galway or Cork, in Carinthia or Krain. The Ugrian or Ogre prairies have no roads, or rather they are all road; and the driver takes you across country when and where he wills. The peasantry are 'men on horseback,'—in this matter preserving the customs of their Hun and Tartar ancestors. They speak a tongue of Turkish affinity, all their sympathies are with their blood-kinsmen the Turks, and they have toiled to deserve the savage title of 'white Turks,' lately conferred upon them by Europe.
"Fiume, the only seaport of Hungary, is a study of Hungarian nationality. The town is neatly built, well paved, and kept tolerably clean by Slav and Italian labour, the former doing the coarse, the latter the fine work. The port is, or rather is to be, bran-new. Because Austria chooses to provide a worse than useless, and frightfully expensive—in fact, ruinous—harbour for Trieste, whose anchoring roads were some of the best in Europe, therefore (admire the consequence) Hungary demands a similar folly for her emporium, Fiume, whose anchoring roads are still better. After throwing a few million of florins into the water, the works are committed to the charge of the usual half-dozen men and boys; moreover, as the port is supposed to improve, so its shipping and its business fall off in far quicker ratio. Commerce cannot thrive amongst these reckless, feckless people. There is no spirit of enterprise, no union to make force, no public spirit; the dead cities of the Zuyder Zee are bustling New England centres in comparison with Fiume; and the latter, which might have become the emporium of the whole Dalmatian coast, and a dangerous rival to Trieste, is allowing her golden opportunity to pass away never to return. For when Dalmatia shall have been vitalized by the addition of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, her glorious natural basins—harbours that can hold all the navies of the world—will leave Fiume mighty little to do except what she does now, look pretty and sit in the sun.
"All Englishmen who have lived long amongst Hungarians remark the similarity of the Magyar and the southern Irish Catholic. Both are imaginative and poetical, rather in talk than in books; neither race ever yet composed poetry of the highest class. Both delight in music; but, as the 'Irish Melodies' are mostly Old English, so the favourites of Hungary are gypsy songs. Both have the 'gift of the gab' to any extent, while their eloquence is notably more flowery than fruity. Both are sharp and intelligent, affectionate and warm-hearted; easily angered and appeased, delighted with wit, and to be managed by a bon mot; superficial, indolent, sensitive, punctilious, jealous, quarrelsome, passionate, and full of fight. Both are ardent patriots, with an occasional notable exception of treachery; both are brilliant soldiers; the Hungarians, who formerly were only cavalry men, now form whole regiments of the Austrian Line. They are officered by the Germans, who will not learn the language, justly remarking, 'If we speak Magyar, we shall be condemned for ever to Magyar corps, and when the inevitable split takes place, where shall we then be?' Both are bold and skilful riders; and, as the expatriated Irish Catholic was declared by Louis Le Grand—an excellent authority upon such matters—to be 'one of the best gentlemen in Europe,' so Europe says the same of the Hungarian haute volée.
"As regards politics and finance, Buda-Pest is simply a modern and eastern copy of Dublin. The Hungarian magnate still lives like the Squireen and Buckeen of the late Mr. Charles Lever's 'earliest style;' he keeps open house, he is plundered by all hands, and no Galway landowner of the last generation was less fitted by nature and nurture to manage his own affairs. Hence he is drowned in debt, and the Jew usurer is virtually the owner of all those broad acres which bear so little. An 'Encumbered Estates Bill' would tell strange tales; but the sabre is readily drawn in Hungary, and the 'chosen people,' sensibly enough, content themselves with the meat of the oyster, leaving the shells to the owner.
"This riotous, rollicking style of private life finds its way into public affairs; and as a model of 'passionate politics,' the Hungarian is simply perfect. He has made himself hateful to the sober-sided German and to the dull Slav; both are dead sick of his outrecuidance; the former would be delighted to get rid of the selfish and short-sighted irrepressibles, who are ever bullying and threatening secession about a custom tax, or a bank, or a question of union. They are scandalized by seeing the academical youth, the jeunesse dorée of Magyar universities, sympathizing with Turkish atrocities, declaring Turkey to be the defender of European civilization, fackelzuging the Turkish Consul, insulting the Russians, and sending a memorial sabre to a Sirdar Ekrem (Commander-in-Chief), whose line of march was marked by the fire-blackened walls of Giaour villages, and by the corpses of murdered Christians, men and women and babes. Could the Austro-Germans only shake off the bugbear of Panslavism, they would cut the cable, allow the ne'er-do-well Hungarian craft to drift away water-logged into hypostatic union with that big ironclad the Turk; they would absorb the whole of Bosnia, the Herzegovina, and Albania; they would cultivate the Slav nationality, and they would rely upon racial difference of dialect and religion to protect them against the real or imaginary designs of Russia. Prince Eugène of Savoy, in the last century, a man of wit, was of that opinion, and so are we.