Chapter I: Foreword

There is no more dangerous centre of future disturbance, if not of a new war, than the regions which include Hungary and its immediate neighbours. For the moment there is in Hungary herself the domination of a reactionary and somewhat militaristic party; and this party is lending encouragement, secret or open, to just the kind of movements that want to stir up war. The materials for this campaign exist mainly in the transfer of some of the population of the Old Hungary to the New States that have come into existence. With this transfer, a large body of Magyars have been placed under the control of men of another race; the numbers are formidable: 800,000 under the Rumanians, 636,000 under the Czechoslovakians, and 100,000 under the control of Yugo-Slavia.

That such a transfer of allegiance should be bitter to a proud race like the Magyars is intelligible; one can sympathize up to a certain point with them. But the answer to the complaint must be found in their own inexcusable and almost incredible persecution of those other races, while they held omnipotent sway over not only the Magyar but many other races. The Magyar ascendancy had nothing like it in the modern world outside, perhaps, the Orange regime in the six counties of Ulster; suffice it to say that there is no form of ascendancy which was not carried out ruthlessly and deliberately; jerrymandering, incredible under-representation in the Parliament; relentless suppression of the language and the schools of those other races; with now and then the exercise of brute force to prevent the expression of opinion, and occasionally this suppression in blood. To ask any of these now emancipated peoples to go back to such servitude would be at once unjust and impossible.

It is a misfortune of these Magyar peoples who have been transferred that geography has so intermingled them with the majorities of the other races and new kingdoms, that you could no more separate them from their present habitations than cut out the heart of a body and expect it still to live. These Magyars have the right to the liberties of every minority--even though they themselves never respected these liberties in others; liberty as to language and school and Church--and any of the new Governments which now rule them will fall under the disapproval of all liberal thinkers in the world if they do not live up to this obligation.

The writer of this book is a man trained in observation, has visited these regions, and gives the results of his investigations in what appears to me a fair and impartial spirit; and I recommend the perusal of his pages as the best guide to the problems of this storm-tossed centre; and as a useful antidote to the agitation which is being carried on in this country against the new kingdoms by the British reactionaries who naturally throw their sympathies to the side of reaction elsewhere.

_March, 1923._ T. P. O’CONNOR.