ntinually
hampered by Hungary, where racial monopoly has grown worse and worse. The
Magyar Chauvinists attempted the impossible--the assimilation by seven
million people of twelve million others. Yet in spite of every imaginable
trick--a corrupt and oppressive administration, gross manipulation of the
franchise, press persecution, the suppression of schools and ruthless
restriction of every form of culture--the non-Magyar races are stronger
to-day than in 1867. And the result of the struggle has been in Hungary a
decay of political standards, a corruption of public life, such as fills
even the greatest optimists with despair.

Sec.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