note 15: See The History of Protestantism, by Rev. J.A. Wylie, Part
29.]

[Footnote 16: The Magyars; their Country and Institutions.]

CHAPTER XVIII.

Political difficulties--Impatient criticism of foreigners--Hungary
has everything to do--Tenant-farmers wanted--Wages.

It is remarkable that the Saxons in Transylvania, who had suffered so
much tribulation from the religious persecutions of the house of
Hapsburg, preferring even to shelter themselves under the protection of
the Turk, should be the first to support the tyranny of Austria against
the Magyars in 1848.

I visited at the house of a village pastor, who told me he had himself
led four hundred Saxons against the Hungarians at that time. The
remembrance of that era is not yet effaced; so many people not much
beyond middle age had taken part in the war that the bitterness has not
passed out of the personal stage. Pacification and reconciliation, and
all the Christian virtues, have been evoked; but underlying the calm
surface, all the old hatreds of race still exist. Nothing assimilates
socially or politically in Hungary. The troubled history of the past
reappears in the political difficulty of the present. And what can be
done when the Magyar will not hold with the Saxon, and the Saxon cannot
away with the Szekler? Are not the ever-increasing Wallacks getting
numerically ahead of the rest, while the Southern Slavs threaten the
integrity of the empire?

Prosperity is the best solvent for disaffection. When the resources of
Hungary are properly developed, and wealth results to the many, bringing
education and general enlightenment in its train, there will be a common
ground of interest, even amongst those who differ in race, religion, and
language. It was a saying of the patriotic Count Szechenyi, and the
saying has passed into a proverb, "Make money, and enrich the country;
an empty sack will topple over, but if you fill it, it will stand by its
own weight."

"You call yourselves 'the English of the East,'" I said one day to a
Hungarian friend of mine; "but how is it you are not more practical,
since you pay us the compliment of following our lead in many things?"

"You do not see that in many respects we are children, the Hungarians
are children," replied my friend. "'We are not, but we shall be,' said
one of our patriots. You Britishers are rash in your impatient
criticism of a state which has not come to its full growth. It is hardly