One must not be taken in by such mere stage decorations as the Hungarian law of nationalities of 1868--in appearance the most generous measure that could be devised, but never put into practice; nor by the glib phrases of Magyar propagandists about the unparallelled freedom that existed in Hungary, and the zeal with which the government fostered the languages and culture of the non-Magyar races. Anything more insolently defiant of the truth could scarcely be imagined. What has really gone on in Hungary in the past fifty years--what “the peaceful propagation of Magyar culture” meant--is something not easy to condense into a few words. In the briefest summary, however, it includes: The exclusion of the non-Magyar languages from all state schools, the courts of law, administrative intercourse, and every other kind of official use; Scandalous violation of the rights of freedom of person, speech, meeting, and association; Systematic and merciless persecution of every manifestation of non-Magyar national sentiment; An exaggerated irritability or arrogance of power, which has led Magyar authorities to impose sentences totalling twenty-nine years of imprisonment on a few petitioners who ventured to complain to the Emperor-King; to expel schoolboys or seminarians merely for speaking Roumanian or Slovak in the streets; or to imprison a nursemaid for “conspiring against the state” by allowing a three-year-old child to wear a bow with the Roumanian colors; The virtual exclusion of non-Magyars from public office; A parliamentary franchise narrow and complicated beyond description, and so administered as regularly to assure to the Magyar minority all but about 10 of the 413 seats in Parliament, so that the other races were virtually disfranchised; An unrivalled system of gerrymandering; Parliamentary elections stained with every form of outrage, fraud, and illegality, with coercion so freely employed that the government itself boasted that at the last elections it had used _only_ 194 battalions of infantry and 114 squadrons of cavalry, and it has often been said that Hungarian elections resembled nothing so much as a civil war. Such are some of the features of what may fairly be called the most odious system of racial oppression known to modern Europe. It is, of course, true that this system was the work of the ruling oligarchy--a class which showed itself averse to democratic progress in any form, and which also chastised the Magyar proletariat with whips, even if it reserved its scorpions for the non-Magyars. But that made little practical difference. The cardinal fact was that after standing this sort of thing for fifty years, the subject peoples had come to execrate the very name of Magyar. If a chance for liberation presented itself, then, as some one has said, not even an angel from heaven could have dissuaded them from seizing it.