ntic and technical; but in reality it is the key which explains the
whole social structure of Hungary, even its economic and agrarian problems.

The period from the death of Joseph II. to the great revolutionary movement
of 1848 may be regarded, so far as eastern Europe is concerned, as a period
when nationality is simmering everywhere. It is a period of preparation for
the rise of national States--ushered in by the great crime of the Polish
Partition, to which so many modern evils may be traced, and closed by a
sudden explosion which shook Europe from Paris to Budapest, from Palermo to
Berlin. The first stage was of course the long Napoleonic war, during which
the seed was sown broadcast; the second, the era of reaction and political
exhaustion (1815-1848), when all that was best in Europe concentrated in
the Romantic movement in literature, art, and music.

For Austria this period was bound up with the name of Metternich, who
personified the old hide-bound methods of the bureaucracy, the diplomacy of
a past age, to which the nations were mere pawns on a chessboard. Under him
the "Police-State" assumed its most perfect form, a form not even surpassed
by Russia from 1881 to 1905.

Then came the year 1848, when the dams burst. The Hungarian constitution,
restored in its entirety, became for a time the watchword and inspirer
of the movement, while Austria for the first time received a serious
constitution. Unhappily the issue between Reaction and Progress was not
a clear one. The Magyars in Hungary unquestionably stood for historic
development and constitutional rights, but they also stood for racial
hegemony, for the forcible assimilation of all the other races, for a
unitary Magyar State instead of the old polyglot Hungary. They thus
drove all the other races to coalesce with the dynasty and the forces of
reaction. The result was a violent racial war, with all kinds of excesses.
Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Saxons, all fought against the Magyars,
and finally the scale was turned by the Russian troops who poured across
the Carpathians in the name of outraged autocracy.

There followed the inevitable reaction, which again can be best summed up
in two phrases--that of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, "Austria will astonish
the world by her ingratitude," so strikingly fulfilled in the Crimean War,
when Austria left Russia in the lurch; and that of a Hungarian patriot,
"The other races have received as reward what we Magy