§2. _Hungary and Magyar Misrule_.--Such an assertion may seem to run counter to the common idea of Hungary as the home of liberty and the vanguard of popular uprisings against despotism, and it is certainly incompatible with the arrogant claim of Magyar Statesmen that "nowhere in the world is there so much freedom as in Hungary." At the risk of disturbing the proportion of this chapter, I propose to give a few classic illustrations of Magyar methods, selected almost at random from an overwhelming mass of damning evidence.
On paper Hungary possesses a most admirable and enlightened law guaranteeing "the Equal Rights of Nationalities" (1868); in practice, it has remained almost from the very first a dead letter. Let us take the field of education. Every effort, legal and illegal, has been made to Magyarise the educational system, with the result that in all the primary and secondary schools under State control Magyar is the exclusive language of instruction, while the number of denominational schools has been steadily diminished and their sphere of action, as more favourable to the non-Magyar races, materially restricted. Fifty years ago the Slovaks, who even then numbered over two millions, possessed three gymnasia (middle schools) which they had founded and maintained by their own exertions. In 1875 all three were arbitrarily closed by orders of the Hungarian Government, and since that date the unhappy Slovaks have not been allowed a single secondary school in which their own language is taught, while the number of their primary schools has been reduced from 1821 in 1869 to 440 in 1911. The deliberate aim is, of course, to prevent the growth of a Slovak middle class. It is quite a common thing for schoolboys to be persecuted or even dismissed for showing Slovak proclivities or even talking their mother--tongue "ostentatiously" on the street. Only last year a brilliant young Slovak student, known to me personally, was deprived by the Magyar authorities of a scholarship in Oriental languages, for no other reason than that he was "untrustworthy in a national sense"![1] Such instances are even more frequent among the Roumanians of Hungary. A specially notorious case occurred in March 1912 at Grosswardein, when sixteen Roumanian theological students were expelled from the Catholic seminary for the "demonstrative use" of their language, which was regarded as offensive by their fellow-students and professors!