The War and DemocracySeton-Watson, R. W. (Robert William)
History
The War and Democracy
Seton-Watson, R. W. (Robert William)
Europe -- Politics and government -- 1871-1918; Nationalism -- Europe; World War, 1914-1918
Linguistic restrictions are carried to outrageous lengths. There is not
a single inscription in any language save Magyar in any post office or
railway station throughout Hungary. Slovak medals and stamps, produced
in America and bearing such treasonable inscriptions as "For our Slovak
language" and "I am proud to be a Slovak," have been confiscated in
Hungary. Only Magyar inscriptions are tolerated on the tombstones of the
Budapest cemeteries. The erection of monuments to Roumanian or Slovak
patriots has more than once been prohibited, and the funds collected have
been arbitrarily seized and applied to Magyar purposes. National colours,
other than the Magyar, are strictly forbidden. Two years ago, at the
funeral of a Roumanian poet at Kronstadt (Transylvania) gendarmes pressed
up to the hearse and clipped off the colours from a wreath which had been
sent by the Society of Journalists in Bucarest. About the same time a nurse
was sent to prison because a child of three was found wearing a Roumanian
tricolor bow, and its parents were reprimanded and fined. Last July on the
very eve of war, fifteen theological students, returning to Bucarest from
an excursion into Transylvania, were arrested at the frontier by Hungarian
gendarmes, hauled by main force out of the train, sent back to Hermannstadt
and kept for days in gaol; their offence consisted in waving some Roumanian
tricolors from the train windows as they steamed out of the last station in
Hungary!
No law of association exists in Hungary, and the government uses its
arbitrary powers to prohibit or suppress even such harmless organisations
as temperance societies, choral unions, or women's leagues. Perhaps the
most notorious examples are the dissolution of the Slovak Academy in
1875 and of the Roumanian National Party's organisation in 1894; but the
treatment meted out to trades unions and working-class organisations, both
Magyar and non-Magyar, for years past, has been equally scandalous. The
right of assembly is no less precarious in a country where parliamentary
candidates are arrested or expelled from their constituencies, where
deputies are prevented from addressing their constituents, where an
electoral address is often treated as a penal offence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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