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She will become a national Magyar State, but in a sense very different from that which her Jingo politicians have intended not by assimilating the non-Magyar races of the country, but by losing to the other national States by which she will be surrounded all but the purely Magyar districts of the central plains.
This programme involved the emancipation of the non-Magyar races of Hungary from the intolerable racial tyranny of the Magyars, and at the same time a serious attempt to solve the Southern Slav question by unifying the race under Habsburg rule.
Those who have defended the possibility and necessity of Austria-Hungary and at one time it was Palacky himself demanded a confederated state of equal nations and lands. But the dualist Austria-Hungary became the oppressor of non-German and non-Magyar nationalities.
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.
The chief gainer by the change will be the Magyar peasantry, who have in their own way been exploited by the ruling oligarchy as cruelly as their non-Magyar neighbours.
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.
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.
Hitherto the government of the day has secured a parliamentary majority by corrupting and terrorising the non-Magyar constituencies of the periphery and thus out-voting the radical Magyar stalwarts of the great plain; and with the loss of the Slovak, Ruthene and Roumanian districts this system would automatically collapse.
Perhaps the most notorious examples are the dissolution of the Slovak Academy in 1875 and of the Roumanian National 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 rights of the Czech language have been ruthlessly violated during the war, and the absolutist military rule has reigned throughout Bohemia and other non-German and non-Magyar parts of the monarchy as in enemy countries.
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