from the king to the diet, had ever been countersigned by an Austrian minister. A ministry responsible to the parliament of Austria, and not responsible to the parliament of Hungary, could not administer the government of the latter country; and the same ministry could not be responsible to both parliaments. If Hungary was not to be incorporated with Austria, it was necessary that she should have a separate ministry, responsible only to her own diet. An act providing such a ministry was passed unanimously, in both houses of the diet, with the full concurrence of the Archduke Palatine. To complete the administration of the kingdom, and to preserve and maintain the due influence of the crown in the constitution, it was demanded, on the part of the crown, that the powers of the Palatine or viceroy should be extended; and having found a precedent--a preliminary almost as necessary in the diet of Hungary as in the parliament of Great Britain and Ireland--an act was passed without opposition, giving the Palatine, in the absence of the king, full powers to act in the name and on behalf of the sovereign. By unanimous votes of both houses, the diet not only established perfect equality of civil rights and public burdens amongst all classes, denominations, and races in Hungary and its provinces, and perfect toleration for every form of religious worship, but, with a generosity perhaps unparalleled in the history of nations, and which must extort the admiration even of those who may question the wisdom of the measure, the nobles of Hungary abolished their own right to exact either labour or produce in return for the lands held by urbarial tenure, and thus transferred to the peasants the absolute ownership, free and for ever, of nearly half the cultivated land in the kingdom, reserving to the original proprietors of the soil such compensation as the government might award from the public funds of Hungary. More than five hundred thousand peasant families were thus invested with the absolute ownership of from thirty to sixty acres of land each, or about twenty millions of acres amongst them. The elective franchise was extended to every man possessed of capital or property of the value of thirty pounds, or an annual income of ten pounds--to every man who has received a diploma from a university, and to every artisan who employs an apprentice. With the concurrence of both countries, Hungary and Transylvania were united, and their diets, hitherto separate, were incorporated. The number of representatives which Croatia was to send to the diet was increased from three to eighteen, while the internal institutions of that province remained unchanged; and Hungary undertook to compensate the proprietors for the lands surrendered to the peasants, to an extent greatly exceeding the proportion of that burden which would fall on the public funds of the province. The complaints of the Croats, that the Majjars desired to