“In comparison with the Government of Magyarland the Government of Austria is a model of tolerance.”[23]
This is the opinion of an Englishman who knows conditions in Hungary well. Exterminate the race, suppress its language, obliterate every evidence of its existence: that is now and has been for decades the policy of the Hungarian Government toward the Slovaks.
Some time ago the American Slovaks formulated a demand for autonomy in a memorandum which they sent to influential friends and to those whom they hope to win as friends. The memorandum “voices the sentiment and national aspirations, not only of Slovaks living in the United States, but also interprets the mind and the will of their brothers, inhabiting, since times immemorial, the ancestral homelands of the race.” That the American Slovaks took the initiative in issuing the memorandum is not hard to understand. “The Slovaks at home are not permitted to approach their king with grievances, the last deputation to him having been denied admittance. Slovaks, therefore, are made to feel that they have no king, only a government—a government, however, that knows no mercy, that feels no remorse, that offers no hope, that fears no punishment. If Slovaks are resolved to speak at all, if they wish the world at large to know the measure of their wrongs, under existing conditions, they can only appeal through the medium of their compatriots in the United States.”
Of the Magyars as a nation the Slovaks do not complain. It is the Hungarian Government which they accuse of oppression.
When the time approaches to re-draw the map of Austria-Hungary, the Slovaks will ask to be freed from the Hungarian yoke. And if they cannot have a government of their own, their second choice is to co-operate with the Bohemians toward the establishment of a confederacy that shall include the autonomous states of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakland. Thus to the present ethnical unity of Slovaks and Bohemians another bond would be added, that of political unity.
Thomas Čapek.
References: The Slovaks of Hungary, The Knickerbocker Press, New York, 1906, by Thomas Čapek; Racial Problems in Hungary, Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd., London, 1908, by Scotus Viator. Die Unterdrückung der Slovaken durch die Magyaren, Prague, 1903.