twenty-four persons, including Mr. Hurban
the leading Slovak poet, were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying
from fourteen days to six months. The three girls who had presented the
flowers were let off with a fine of L16.

Perhaps the reader will regard me as a very dangerous conspirator, when I
tell him that in June 1910 an old lady of seventy-three, the widow of a
high-school headmaster, was fined L4 because I had called at her house for
twenty minutes on election day without its being notified to the police,
and that in June 1914 an enquiry was instituted by the local authorities
against some Slovak friends who had entertained me to luncheon! And yet I
can honestly assert that I have never been guilty of any worse crime than
Captain Grose, of whom Burns warned my countrymen a hundred years ago in
the famous line:

A chiel's amang ye takin' notes!

The fabric of Magyar rule is far too rotten and corrupt to regard with
equanimity any extensive note-taking on the part of the outer world.

Whole books might be written to illustrate the contention that in matters
of education, administration, and justice, of association and assembly, of
the franchise and the press, the non-Magyar nationalities of Hungary have
long been the victims of a policy of repression which is without any
parallel in civilised Europe. It is this Magyar system, from which I have
lifted but a corner of the veil, that is one of the mainsprings of the
present war, and if there is to be a new and healthy Europe in the future,
this system must be swept away root, branch and stock. To such lengths has
national fanaticism driven the Magyars that in 1906 it was possible for an
ex-Premier of Hungary, speaking in open Parliament amid the applause of the
majority, to lay down the following axiom: "The legal State is the aim:
but with this question we can only concern ourselves when we have already
assured the national State.... Hungary's interests demand its erection on
the most extreme Chauvinist lines." Men who applaud such a sentiment
are worthy allies of those so-called statesmen who regard international
treaties as "a mere scrap of paper."

Sec.3. _The Decay of the Dual System_.--The radical divergence of political
development in Austria and in Hungary, its paralysing effect upon the
foreign policy of the Monarchy as a whole, coupled with the growth
of national feeling among the minor nationalities and their steady
emancipation fr