ing with the booking clerk. How was the traveller
to learn that the non-Magyar peasant wished to buy a ticket for his
native village, whose name had just been Magyarized, and that the
clerk refused to sell a ticket except the peasant used a name he did
not know? And when the peasant had walked home he might see in the
village register that he who had been Saba was now Shebek and that his
friend Ziva, who could speak no word of Magyar, was now Vitaljos; and
that the children of poor Vitaljos, in order that they should not
suffer from their father's handicap, were not confining their
education to ordinary subjects, but were learning the Magyar language
for seventeen hours every week. Well, how was your traveller to know
that if a person used his own tongue in the law courts, which was very
probably the tongue of everyone who lived there save a handful of
officials, one of these officials who was accidentally in court would
say he was acquainted with that person's language? The judge would
take his word for it and he would start interpreting. When the
Hungarians came to deal with the Croats they were careful to give
them, for the world's eye, a great deal of autonomy. Strossmayer,
assisted by the historian Ra[vc]ki, had in April 1866 led a deputation
to Buda-Pest when it was clear that extreme divergencies existed
between the Croats and the Magyars. Among other Croatian demands was
one that Rieka should no longer be the scene of Magyar intrigues. As
yet the town's importance was not great: in 1869 she had only 17,884
inhabitants and the total of her exports and imports did not exceed
150,000 tons. But everybody knew that by the building of a direct line
to Croatia and to the valleys of the Save, the Drave and the Danube
there would come an era of prosperity. The Magyars had allied
themselves with the Autonomist party, showing them what great
advantages the town would reap if it were joined to Hungary. Would not
Hungary, for instance, be able to manipulate the railway freights?
There had been constant bickerings between the Croats and the
Autonomist party, so that Strossmayer's deputation asked that the
Magyars should refrain from giving to the latter their financial and
moral support. But the Magyars had no such intention. "One should try
to convince everyone," said Ra[vc]ki, "that in national politics the
Magyars and ourselves stand at the Antipodes. We see in the Slav and
Yugoslav solidarity the most powerful guarantee fo