Kingdom of Hungary

“ The kingdom of Hungary is called the realm of St. Stephen to this day, the Hungarian kings are still crowned with the crown of St. Stephen, and the nation acknowledges only him to be its king whose temples have been touched by the sacred crown. The Catholic Church in Hungary although it no more occupies its former pre-eminent position in the state, still retains enough of power, wealth, and splendor to bear ample testimony to the lavish liberality of St. ”

“ Hungary is a conquered country. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was a very great kingdom, but in the sixteenth century its power declined, and, the king having died, Turkey and Austria fought for the possession of the crown, Austria eventually gaining the day.
Ferdinand I., a prince of the Austrian House of Hapsburg, was declared King of Hungary, and ever since then the Emperor of Austria has been crowned King of Hungary.
The Hungarians have never felt satisfied with the Austrian rule, and have frequently revolted. ”

“ There were, no doubt, elements of discord in Hungary, of which Austria, on former occasions as well as now, took advantage; but their value to her in the present war has been greatly overrated. The population of the kingdom, like that of the empire, is composed of various races, amongst which there are differences of language, religion, customs, and sentiments. Of the 14,000,000 of people who inhabit Hungary, not more than 5,000,000 are Majjars, about 1,262,000 are Germans, 2,311,000 Wallacks, and, of the remaining 5,400,000, nine-tenths or more are Sclaves. ”

“ It should be remarked that this question of constitutional government for the other provinces of the Austrian Empire—save Hungary—stands quite apart, and must be considered apart from the complications which have arisen with regard to Hungarian affairs. Hungary declines absorption into the general body of the Empire. Hungary is a kingdom by itself, and refuses to be cast into the melting-pot. She consents to be united to Austria by the golden link of the Crown, but will not budge one inch further. ”

“ If a few battles are lost, if Russian troops pour through the passes of the Carpathians and the Cossacks come within sight of Buda-Pesth? After all, Hungary is an independent kingdom, and a part of the Austrian empire only of her own free will. Her army is her own, and she has her own parliament and her own ministers. There is no reason why she should not have a king of her own again when she chooses. We may see the rise of another Kossuth, who would force Hungary to make peace with Russia and with Servia. ”

“ A Palatine or Viceroy, representing the Sovereign, was the actual head of the kingdom. Outside of Hungary proper, the Croats had their local Diet at Agram, and Transylvania had hers; both also chose representatives to the Hungarian Diet. In a measure, therefore, we may call Hungary a federation, not forgetting, however, that it was a federation in which one race, the Magyars, domineered. The Latin language was the common medium of communication between Hungary and Austria, and among the diverse peoples. ”

“ The spirit of the Hungarian constitution requires that the estates should assemble at least once in every five years; the practice of the same constitution leaves the king at liberty to call together, and to dissolve the chambers at pleasure. I have already stated, that to the higher order of nobility, the privilege appertains of meeting, in their own persons, to deliberate on questions affecting the public weal. These,—the princes and magnates,—occupy the same chamber with the prelates and barons of the kingdom. ”

“ The Ausgleich involved as one of its fundamentals a guarantee for all time of the laws, constitution, legal independence, freedom, and territorial integrity of Hungary and its subordinate countries. And throughout all of the unsettlement and conflict which the past half-century has brought in the Austro-Hungarian world the constitution of kingdom and empire alike has stood firm against every shock. ”

“ He bade the people throughout the land to fast and pray, for not alone his kingdom was at stake, but the independence of the Hungarian Church was menaced by the imperial forces. Those who looked with indifference at the cause of the Hungarian crown and the cross, had their enthusiasm excited by the proud satisfaction of fighting in defence of the national dignity and liberty. Amongst those western nations who had been for so long a time harassed by the military expeditions of the Hungarians, the German people, feeling its strength, was the first to turn its arms against the former assailants. ”

“ Whether Hungary extended, as it did under Louis the Great in the fourteenth century, from Pomerania to Bulgaria, or as under Matthias, from Saxony to Servia, the Magyar kingdom always had an unbroken continuity of territory such as is in our own times possessed only by the several great States of Europe. The same remark applies to Poland, with a few insignificant allowances, and also to the kingdom of Bohemia. ”

“ But the Kingdom on Hungary has been a mass of very concrete political power in its hands, and has supplied in some degree the weight of nationality that was otherwise wanting in the dominions of the House. The mixture of races under the Austrian sovereigns is the most extraordinary in Europe. Their possessions exactly cover that part of the continent in which its earlier and later invaders fought longest and most ”

“ Under the reign of the Anjous we shall see the culture and customs of Western Europe gradually taking root in Hungarian soil, the name of Hungary becoming the object of respect and admiration abroad, the boundaries of the kingdom extended by a powerful hand, the crown of a brave and chivalrous neighbor, the Polish nation, placed upon the brows of the Hungarian king, until, at last, as152 the Hungarian poet Bajza sings, “the shores of three seas formed the frontier walls of the kingdom.” ”

“ THE TABLES TURNED ON HUNGARY The Treaty of Trianon, signed on June 4, 1920, destroyed a kingdom that had existed for a thousand years by allotting two thirds of the territory and population of the historic realm to Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Jugoslavia, and Austria. Before the collapse of the Central Empires Hungary had a population of about twenty-two millions, nearly half of whom were Hungarian. ”

“ For the next two years all Hungary was convulsed by a horrible civil war, during which the unhappy young king, who fought for his heritage to the last with desperate valour, was driven from one end of his kingdom to the other like a hunted beast. ”

“ The internal dissensions, however, were sapping the very foundation of the kingdom; and in 1514 Hungary was afflicted with one of the terrible peasant revolts then not infrequent in Austria and Germany, which invariably led to the most inhuman as well as illegal treatment of the defeated peasants. A crusade against the infidel Turk, announced by Bakdcz as legate of the Pope, gave rise to vast gatherings of peasants and other poor people who, on finding that the nobles refrained from joining them, took umbrage at this refusal, and speedily turned their pikes on the nobility as their oppressors. ”

“ The chief peoples, the Wallachians, Saxons, and Roumanians, different as they are among themselves, are united in common discontent against the attempts of Hungary to impose her own language and ideas on the land they share. They cannot forget that for nearly two centuries, from 1538, they were an independent kingdom under a king of their own choosing, and it was not till 1699 that the influence of Austria as suzerain was allowed.200 The support of the Turks alone rendered this independence possible, it is true, but, however obtained, it gave the people a taste for freedom. ”

“ Wherefore, glorifying God, we express the greatest gratitude of which we are capable to your Majesty, and loudly promise that no vicissitude shall shake us in the indissoluble alliance which we have vowed to you.” The booty, gratifying the avarice of a few and the vanity of the nation, could also hardly be reckoned a solid advantage. One important result accrued, undoubtedly by the triumph of the allies, also to Hungary, in the destruction of Ottokar’s Slavic kingdom. ”

“ Had the government of Austria known how to win the hearts of the Hungarians for their sovereign—had they but preserved the good faith and the sanctity of the monarchy in Hungary, how secure and imposing might the position of the Emperor have now been, in the midst of all the troubles in Germany! Hungary desired no revolution ”

“ They laid particular stress upon the fact that the nation, whilst adhering to the religion and customs of its ancestors, had been independent, strong, and mighty, and had even made the whole of Europe tremble; but that now, since it had adopted the religion and customs of the West, the nation was weakened by internal dissensions, strangers had become her masters, foreign armies had penetrated into the very heart of the country—nay, Hungary had lost her independence and had become the vassal of a foreign power. ”

“ Once we had a constitution;—by the blessing of God we succeeded to transform it three years ago from an aristocratic to a democratic one;—now Hungary has no constitution at all. For a thousand years we were a free people; we are now so no longer. Like a flock of sheep, we are appropriated, not by the Austrian empire, not by the nation, but by a despotic ambitious family. ”

“ All social and political prestige and power was with the Magyars-or, to speak more correctly, with the Magyar noblemen.
The political structure of either country was likewise analogous to that of the other. In both, the aristocracy was the paramount element, endowed with chartered or traditional privileges, to the practical exclusion from political power of certain classes of citizens endowed with rights in the modern sense of the term. In Hungary the ruling Order was, in general terms, the nobility. ”

“ Hungary is not now under lawful government, but is being trampled down by a foreign intruder who is not King of Hungary, being neither acknowledged by the nation, nor sanctioned by law. Hungary is, in a word, in a state of WAR against the Hapsburg dynasty, a war of legitimate defence, by which alone it can ever regain independence and freedom. By such war alone has any nation ever won its freedom from oppressors; as you see in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, France, Sweden, Norway, Greece, the United States, and England itself. ”

“ The more intelligent and influential are now convinced, that it is to Hungary—to which they owe the liberty they enjoy—and not to anarchy, or to Austria, against the attacks of whose government Hungary has so long defended their freedom and her own, that they must look for advancement. ”

“ With the year 1825, when that Diet met, began the modern struggle of Hungary to recover that home rule which one after another of her Hapsburg kings had solemnly sworn to respect, and had as perfidiously disregarded. Thus the seed of the Magyar revolution was sown, like that of so many others, in a demand for the restoration of acknowledged rights, and not in a demand for innovation. Home rule,—Hungary to govern herself, instead of being bullied by foreigners who happened to be also subjects of her Emperor-King,—that seemed an object as simple and definite as it was just. ”

“ Like Poland two centuries later, Hungary had ceased to be a civilized autonomous state because her prelates and her magnates, uncontrolled by any higher authority, and too ignorant or corrupt to look beyond their own immediate interests, abandoned themselves to the exclusive enjoyment of their inordinate privileges, while openly repudiating their primal obligation of defending the state against extraneous enemies. During these miserable years everything like patriotism or public spirit seems to have died out of the hearts of the Hungarian aristocracy. ”

“ But what about Austria-Hungary? In Hungary, it is true, King Charles is a constitutional monarch; that is to say, he is obliged to comply to a great extent with the wishes of the Magyar feudal aristocracy which controls elections to the Budapest parliament. Autocracy in Hungary is carried on in the name of the king by a small minority of the Magyar people, who in their turn are a minority of the people of Hungary. The people of Hungary have far less to say about the way they are governed than the people of Germany. ”

“ Trusting to the movements hitherto successful in Croatia and the Danubian provinces of Hungary,—to the absence of the Hungarian army, and of all efficient preparation for defence on the part of the Hungarian government, and elated with military success in Italy,—the Austrian ministers resumed their intention to subvert the constitution of Hungary, and to fuse the various parts of the emperor's dominions into one whole. ”

“ But the triumph of the reactionary spirit under the reign of King Francis made them conspirators. Those of their friends who joined them were all honest and enthusiastic patriots, who saw in the success of democratic ideas the welfare of Hungary. But they did not look to a revolution for the realization of their fond hopes. They entered the society for the sole purpose of preparing the minds of their countrymen for reforms to be obtained by constitutional means. Almost every Hungarian writer, who was not in some dependent position, belonged to the society. ”

“ I have said that in my opinion, Hungary is thus capable of human happiness. I have said that she possesses that distinct nationality, that power of population, and that of wealth, which entitles her to have a Government of her own; and I have now to add what I am sure will not sound well upon the Upper Danube; and that is, that, in my humble judgment, the imposition of a foreign yoke upon a people capable of self-government, while it oppresses and depresses that people, adds nothing to the strength of those who impose that yoke. ”