“I am quite of your opinion,” answers Baron Kállay, “_ma i danari_, all cannot be done in a day. We have but just completed the Brod-Serayevo line, which takes passengers in a day from Vienna to the centre of Bosnia. It is one of the first boons conferred by the occupation, and its consequences will be almost measureless.” I refer to a speech he has recently pronounced at the Academy of Pesth. In it he develops his favorite subject, the great mission Hungary is destined to fulfil in the future; being connected with the East through the Magyars and with the West through her ideas and institutions, she must be a link between the Eastern and Western worlds. This theory provoked a complete overflow of attacks against Magyar pride from all the German and Slav papers. “These Hungarians,” they said, “imagine themselves to be the centre of the universe and their Hungaria, the entire world, _Ungarischer Globus_. Let them return to their steppes, these Asiatics, these Tartars, these first cousins of the Turks.” In the midst of all this vehemence, I am reminded of a little quotation from a book of Count Zays, which most accurately paints the ardent patriotism of the Hungarians at once, their honor and strength, but which develops a spirit of domination and makes them detested by other races. The quotation is as follows: “The Magyar loves his country and his nationality better than humanity, better than liberty, better than himself, better even than God and his eternal salvation.” Kállay’s high intelligence prevents his falling into this exaggerated Chauvinism. “No one understood me,” he says, “and no one chose to understand. I was not talking politics. I had no desire to do so in our Academy at a scientific and literary meeting. I simply announced an undeniable fact. Situated at the point of junction of a series of different races and for the very reason that we speak a non-Indo-Germanic idiom—call it even Asiatic, if you will—we are compelled to be acquainted with all the languages of Western Europe. Our institutions, our educational systems, belong to the Western world. At the same time, by some mysterious connection with our blood, Eastern dialects are very easily accessible and comprehensible to us. I have over and over again remarked that I can grasp much more clearly the meaning of an Eastern manuscript or document by translating it into Magyar, than if I read a German or English translation of it.”