those who dare encounter them in the course of a civil war, for even their tender mercies are cruel. When the passions of the Magyars are not excited, however, their conduct is neither overbearing nor tyrannical; they have too much real bravery, and are too high spirited and generous, for the one or the other. The patient and laborious Wallachians and Sclavonians have tilled the ground for them for centuries, hardly conscious how firmly the yoke of servitude rested on their necks.

Hungary has been aptly compared to an old feudal castle, with its donjons and moats, its battlements and portcullis, which the modern reformers wished to transform at once into an elegant and convenient modern habitation. The first step necessary in so sweeping a reform was to level it with the ground; and those who had made this rash attempt soon found that they had miscalculated the strength of the antique and massive pile. They succeeded only in pulling down some of the outworks upon their own heads. Among these classes so widely separated, among races that are foreign, and even hostile, to each other, with different religions, different tongues, and different civilizations, it was vain to think of introducing the modern ideas of democracy and equality; and the Magyars themselves have never attempted it.

The Magyars inhabit chiefly the central and eastern portions of Hungary, having the Slowacks on the north, the Wallachians on the east, and the Croatians and other Illyro-Sclavonians on the south. The great estates of their titled nobles, or magnates, as they are called, extend over every portion of the country, as the other races, till quite recently, owned little or no land in Hungary proper, except in the free cities, where the land had been freed by purchase, or released from feudal obligations by the favor of the crown. It is estimated by the latest statisticians, that the nobles, who are all Magyars, number at least 600,000, including women and children, so that one seventh part of this dominant race enjoy the privileges of rank; but the magnates do not exceed two hundred in number, most of whom own vast possessions. The untitled nobility have the entire control of the lower house, or second table, as it is called, in the general Diet, this house being composed chiefly of representatives from the county assemblies, and the affairs of the counties, (comitats,)

of which there are about sixty in the kingdom, are regulated exclusively by the Magyar nobles. Thus, as the magnates form the great majority of the upper house, or first table, the whole legislation of the kingdom is in the hands of the nobility. All the Magyar nobles own land, which the poorest of them are often obliged to cultivate with their own hands, as any employment in commerce or the mechanic arts is considered derogatory to their rank, and they do not often engage even in the learned professions. The Magyars who are not noble form the higher class of the peasantry; and though not often rich, they have generally most of the necessaries, and even the comforts of life, as the feudal burdens on their lands are not excessive, and their tenant rights are often very valuable. Whether peasants or nobles, they pride themselves on their race, and regard the Wallachians and Sclavonians as their subjects, if not as inferior beings.

The Magyar language stands by itself, having no affinity or relationship with any other language in Europe; lingua sine matre et sororibus. There are only two other languages on the continent, the Biscayan or Basque, and the Finnish, which are equally isolated; some philologists have attempted to trace an affinity between the Magyar and the Finnish, but the prevailing opinion now is, that the resemblance between them is too slight to afford sure grounds for believing that they sprang originally from the same stock. The Hungarian is said to be a noble language, having a great variety of verbal inflexions, and abounding in majestic and sonorous expressions, so that it is admirably adapted to the purposes of oratory; but it is of very limited use, having hardly any literature, and only a few learned philologists, besides the Magyars themselves, are acquainted with it. This peculiar character of their language alone is enough to point out the Magyars as comparative strangers in the country which they inhabit and own, its former possessors having been deprived of the soil and reduced to servitude. Their attitude in this fair region is still that of conquerors lording it over the ancient inhabitants, who have never succeeded in shaking off the yoke which was imposed on them nearly a thousand years ago. Leaving aside for the present the changes which have been made within the last ten years, it may be said that all the political and civil institutions of the country were contrived

exclusively for the benefit of this dominant race, who form, be it remembered, less than a third part of the population; and down to the outbreak of the recent war, these institutions were exclusively controlled and managed by them. The Magyar peasants, it is true, had nothing to do with the direction of affairs, though their interests, so far as they came in conflict with those of the Sclavonian and Wallachian peasants, were, of course, protected by the great body of the Magyar nobility, who owned all the land, and made all the laws. The guaranties of Hungarian independence, so frequently alluded to in speaking of the union of the country with Austria, were nothing more than stipulations in favor of the privileges of the nobles. The engagement to respect "the ancient constitution" of the land, which was a part of the coronation oath whenever a new emperor of Austria was crowned king of Hungary at Buda, was simply a promise to do nothing to disturb the domination of the Magyar race, and to respect the rights and immunities of the nobles. That these immunities were precious in the eyes of the nobles, and were jealously guarded, we can well believe, inasmuch as they secured to them entire exemption from taxation, all the burdens of the state being borne by the peasants.

So far was this principle carried, that, down to 1840, the nobles were not required to pay the ordinary toll on passing the bridges which were erected for the public convenience. “I shall never forget," writes M. de Langsdorff," the impression I received when, on the bridge which crosses the Danube at Pesth, I saw every peasant, every poor cultivator of the ground, rudely stopped and compelled to pay to both for himself and for the meagre horses harnessed to his cart. The tolls are heavy, amounting to a considerable sum for these poor people; while the Magyar gentlemen, mounted on fine horses, or seated in elegant carriages, passed and repassed without payment. I had read, it is true, that the Hungarian noble was exempted from all public contributions, was subject to no personal tax, and that all burdens fell on the peasants; but there is a great difference between the mention in print of some old injustice of the laws, and the immediate and irritating spectacle of a social wrong. I felt that I belonged to the party of the vanquished, and like them I offered to pay. But the toll-gatherer, perceiving that I was

a stranger, refused my money, and told me that the tax was intended only for the serfs. This exemption, it is true, was a small affair, and tyranny has other practices that are far more odious; but from that time I was no more astonished by the inequalities and anomalies which I witnessed during the rest of my journey; I had foreseen them all on the bridge at Pesth."

As the bridge was built from the public funds, which are supplied exclusively by taxation of the peasants, the injustice of allowing the nobles to pass free is still more obvious. It was one of the grand reforms effected by Count Széchény, that the Diet, in 1836, was induced to vote that the nobility should be subject to toll on passing the fine suspended bridge by which it had been resolved to supersede the floating one at Pesth. The nobles deserve the more credit for this act, for as they have the entire control of both tables of the Diet, they were called upon to vote down one of the privileges of their own order. Though the amount of the toll was insignificant, the passage of the law was acknowledged to be a point of great importance, as it would sacrifice one of the most cherished principles of the ancient constitution of the country, the exemption of the nobility from all public contributions whatever. Count Széchény had labored strenuously to prepare the public mind for the change by the pamphlets which he had published on the subject; and he took the lead as a debater in the Diet in favor of the measure. After the debate, opinions seemed so equally divided that the Palatine, who presided, durst not declare that the bill had passed in the usual way, by acclamation; for the first time in the history of a Hungarian Diet, and though there were great doubts of the legality of such a course, the votes were ordered to be counted, and, in a full house, a majority of six were reported on the side of generosity and justice.

The present position of the Magyars in Hungary is very much what that of the Normans in England was, for the first century or two after the Conquest. Though William had fair pretensions to the crown by right of birth-his title, in fact was quite as good as that of Harold he treated the Saxons, after he had subdued them, as if his only claim to their allegiance rested upon the sword. He exercised all the rights of a conqueror according to the ideas of his own bar

barous age; and his chivalrous but rapacious nobles, with their greedy followers, eagerly seconded his designs. To break the spirit of the conquered Saxons by the insults as much as by the losses inflicted upon them, to proscribe their language as well as to rob them of their estates, to ridicule their habits, and to brand them as an inferior and degraded race, who were unfit to hold office and unworthy to bear arms, was the settled policy of the earlier Norman kings. The Norman French was the language of the court, the nobility, and the parliament, of all legislative acts and legal proceedings, from which, indeed, it has not entirely disappeared even at the present day. The chief captains of the invading army became the great barons of the realm, who were afterwards prompt enough to vindicate the privileges of their order against the arbitrary will of the monarch, but who took very little care of the liberties of the commonalty. But luckily the Normans were not numerous in comparison with the whole body of the Saxon population of England; and as they had to cross the channel to arrive at their new domain, they could not always bring their wives and daughters with them. The fair haired Saxon maidens did more towards the emancipation of the English people than did their fathers and brothers, for they soon began to lead captive their Norman conquerors. In the course of a few generations, very little Norman blood remained entirely pure in the island. A mixed race quickly formed a mixed language, and the English compound soon showed itself more generous and fertile than either the Norman or the Saxon element uncombined. The conquerors were like a mighty river rushing into the ocean with such force as to drive back the waters of the deep, and preserve its freshness some miles from land; but the contest is too unequal, the force of the stream is soon spent, and its sweet waters are finally lost in the saltness of the multitudinous

waves.

Normandy sent forth a little army that was able to conquer England, but was not numerous enough to possess it. Little more than a century before the period of that invasion, the Asiatic hive of nations had sent forth one of its great swarms of Tartar breed, men, women, and children, carrying their tents, rude household utensils, and pagan gods along with them, to find fresh pastures for their herds on the rich fields