tional Party's organisation in 1894; but the
treatment meted out to trades unions and working-class organisations, both
Magyar and non-Magyar, for years past, has been equally scandalous. The
right of assembly is no less precarious in a country where parliamentary
candidates are arrested or expelled from their constituencies, where
deputies are prevented from addressing their constituents, where an
electoral address is often treated as a penal offence.

As for Hungary's electoral system, the less said the better.
Gerrymandering, a narrow and complicated franchise, bribery and corruption
on a gigantic scale, the wholesale use of troops and gendarmes to prevent
opposition voters from reaching the polls, the cooking of electoral rolls,
illegal disqualifications, sham counts, official terrorism, and in many
cases actual bloodshed--such are but a few of the methods which preserve a
political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient
racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the
peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities. Small wonder, then, if
the non-Magyar races of Hungary, who on a basis of population would have
had 198 deputies, never were allowed to elect more than 25, and if even
this scanty number was at the infamous elections of 1910 reduced by
terrorism and corruption to eight!

In judicial matters the situation is no less galling. Petitions are
not accepted in the courts, unless drawn up in Magyar, and the whole
proceedings are invariably conducted in the same language. The non-Magyar
"stands like an ox" before the courts of his native land, and a whole
series of provisions exists for his repression, notably the monstrous
paragraphs dealing with "action hostile to the State," with the "incitement
of one nationality against another" and with the "glorification of a
criminal action"--applied with rigorous severity to all political opponents
of Magyarisation but never to its advocates. Let me cite one classic
example of the latter. In 1898 a well-known Slovak editor was sentenced
to eight months' imprisonment for two articles severely criticising the
Magyarisation of place-names in Hungary. On his return from prison he
was met at the railway station of the little county town by a crowd of
admirers: songs were sung, a short speech of welcome was delivered and a
bouquet of flowers was presented. The sequel of this perfectly orderly
incident was that no fewer than