of measures which substituted that language for the Latin, a language
unintelligible to the great body of the people. If a living was to
be substituted for a dead language, no other than the Majjar could
well be selected. Besides being greatly more numerous than any other
tribe speaking one language, the Majjars were the wealthiest, the most
intelligent and influential; and their language was spoken not only by
their own race, but by a large proportion of the other inhabitants of
the country--probably by six or seven times as many persons as used
any other Hungarian dialect. The Croats, whose language was not that
of any other tribe, could not expect it to be chosen, and all that was
required of them to employ the Majjar where they had hitherto employed
the Latin language, and nowhere else. The county of Agram, the most
important and populous of the three counties of Croatia, repudiated
the notion of a separate Illyrian nationality, of which, however, the
county town was the centre; and clung to Hungary as the safeguard
of its liberty. The truth is that the Croats, of whose hostility to
the Hungarians we have heard so much, are nearly equally divided
between Hungary and Austria; and, but for the military organisation
which places so large a portion of that people at the disposal of
Austria--and that the most formidable portion--the agitators for
Illyrian nationality would probably have been put down by their own
countrymen. The Slovacks, a people of Bohemian origin, refugees from
religious persecution, have joined the Hungarians. A great part of
the people of Sclavonia Proper have refused to take part against
Hungary. The tribes that have engaged most extensively and violently
in hostilities against the Hungarians have been the people of Servian
race, and of the Greek church, in the counties of the Lower Danube, and
in Croatia. Amongst the Hungarian Sclaves of the Greek church, it is
well known that foreign influence has long been at work, for which the
Greek priesthood are ready instruments. The hopes of these tribes have
been turned towards the head of their church, and the sympathies of
thirty millions of Eastern Sclaves who belong to the same church.
Though feelings of nationality and of race have been developed in
Hungary, as elsewhere, to an extent hitherto unexampled, they have
there to contend with the craving for liberty, which has at the same
time acquired intensity, and which amongst the Sclaves has been
fostered and inflamed by the efforts of those who, for the purpose of
exciting them against the Majjars, would persuade them that they were
the victims of oppression. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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