Among all the states of Europe there are few which, from the historical, the geographic, or the economic point of view, might appear to have a better claim to existence than the thousand-year-old kingdom of Hungary. Nature would seem to have marked out for political unity this Pannonian basin, with its marvellously fertile plain of the Alföld in the centre, surrounded on almost every side by mountain walls and mineral-bearing highlands, with its roads and rivers all converging towards the great Danube waterway, and its various parts supplementing each other economically in so admirable a fashion. And here, for once, history and geography did not seem to be working at cross-purposes. Ever since the appearance of those gifted and valiant Asiatics, the Magyars, in the Danubian plain in the ninth century, the Pannonian basin has been united into a state which has shown a remarkable vitality and durability, and whose frontiers, in spite of some temporary fluctuations, have on the whole remained singularly unchanged. If ancient status of possession, economic cohesion, and what may be called the geographic fitness of things, were all the factors that need be taken into account, the Hungarian state, in spite of all its misdeeds, ought to have come through the World War intact. Unfortunately for it, however, there is another factor which counts for even more nowadays: the rights and aspirations of peoples. Hungary has always been a polyglot state. The ruling race, the Magyars, a nation of mixed Finno-Ugrian and Turko-Tartar stock, are a people of the plains like their nomad ancestors. They are said to have a positive aversion for living more than 600 feet above sea level. Hence, except for a few scattered colonies, they have always remained quartered in the plain of the Alföld, leaving the peripheral highlands and the once swampy regions of the south to other races, whom they probably found in the country at the time of their arrival and whose numbers have certainly been increased by subsequent immigration. The Magyars are an island of Asiatics surrounded by a sea of Latins and Slavs.