The tract of territory which, on our maps, we describe as Hungary, is peopled by two distinct races of men;--the Hungarians, who inhabit the great plain of the Danube, of which Cormorn may be regarded as the centre; and the Slavonians, by whom the mountain districts are occupied, as well in Carpatia and Transylvania, as in Croatia and the rugged districts that border upon Styria. Of these, the Hungarians are not considered to amount to more than four millions of souls at the utmost; whereas the numbers of the Slavonians fall not short of six millions.
As is the case elsewhere, however, so has it happened here; the political institutions of the few have been imposed with a strong hand on the many; for the laws that prevail, as well as the machinery created to enforce them, are alike Hungarian. Yet the Hungarians are, so to speak, mere strangers in the land, who owe their original settlement there to the edge of the sword, and by the edge of the sword were long compelled to maintain it.
It seems now to be admitted, that the theory which once connected the conquerors of Pannonia with the Huns, is entirely without foundation. The Hungarians are the descendants of one of those eastern hordes whom the Mongols, in their progress southward, drove from their homes; and who, breaking through Russia, and traversing a large extent of Poland, won a settlement for themselves late in the ninth century, near the sources of the Theiss. Their legends say, that by lineage, they are Magyars, and that they obtained the name which they now bear through an accident. There stood, near the spot where they first permanently encamped, a castle, called in the language of the country, Hung-var, which the strangers won, and converted into a sort of capital. As often as they sallied forth from that castle on predatory or other expeditions, the Slavonians were accustomed to exclaim, "Here come the Hung-varians," and the title thus given at first as a term of mere derision or hostility, came, by-and-by, to be accepted as a national distinction.
I am not prepared to avow either my own acceptance, or my own rejection, of this mode of accounting for the origin of the Hungarian name. There is no good reason to be assigned one way or the other; for nations, like individuals, generally owe their designations to some cause equally simple; but that the Magyars, or Myars, brought with them the elements of that constitution under which it is the boast of their descendants that they still live, is just as easily proved as that we owe our most valuable institutions to the customs and usages of our Saxon forefathers. The Myars, like the Saxons, appear to have lived, during seasons of peace, in obedience to a whole host of petty and independent chiefs. If war broke out, or a foreign expedition was resolved upon, the heads of clans made choice of one of their order to command the rest;--when the exigencies of the moment ceased to operate, the commander fell back into his proper place among his equals. Seven of these tribes are stated to have taken part in the earliest attack on Pannonia. They were led by one Almus, a brave and successful warrior; and soon spread themselves over the whole of the plain; but not for many generations could they count on a permanent cessation from the hostilities with which the mountaineers, driven back, yet unsubdued, continued to harass them. The results were precisely such as occurred in Normandy and England, and every where else, where tribes advanced to a similar pitch of civilization, won settlements by the sword. Arpad, the son of Almus, was chosen to succeed his father; and the foundations were laid both of an hereditary monarchy, and of a power able and willing to place limits to that of the crown.