This ruling race is probably only a minority of the total population. The earliest census of nationalities that we have and the only one that was taken by relatively impartial officials, the census of 1851, makes out the Magyars to be only 37% of the total population. It is true that since the Magyars have taken the census into their own hands, their percentage has risen steadily with each successive decade, until by 1900 they could claim a slight majority, and in 1910 they could boast of 54%. In this latter year they were reckoned at just ten millions, out of a population of eighteen millions for Hungary proper. Their astonishing gains at the expense of the other races were officially explained as due to “the peaceful propagation of Hungarian culture.” Of that “peaceful propagation” I shall speak in a moment; but it should be said here that scarcely any unprejudiced observer accepts Hungarian racial statistics at their face value, and that a more probable estimate would reduce the number of the Magyars to about eight millions. This would make them a minority even in Hungary proper, and much more so in the whole kingdom--i. e., with Croatia included--which had a population of twenty-one millions in 1910. Among the subject races, the Roumanians probably numbered three to three and a half millions; the Slovaks two to three millions; the Ruthenians half a million; the Serbs and Croats three millions; the Germans two millions. Like every other racially composite state, Hungary was placed before the gravest of problems by the nineteenth century revival of the submerged or long dormant nationalities. During the early and middle part of that century, this problem could seldom be seriously faced by the Magyars, for they were engaged in their own battle for constitutional rights against the despotic and centralizing policy of Vienna. In this struggle they displayed a vigor and a tenacity which won for them both the sympathy and admiration of the world and a reputation as liberals and democrats which they have since singularly belied. As soon as their victory over the imperial government was sealed by the Compromise of 1867, as soon as they found themselves masters in Transleithania, the Magyars set to work to deny to the other races of the kingdom all those liberties for which they themselves had been fighting. The programme, henceforth pursued with the most relentless rigor and the most unscrupulous methods, was to ‘assure the unity of the Hungarian State’ by Magyarizing the subject races.