The Kingdom of Hungary, which from 1526 to 1687 had been partially under Turkish rule, led a vegetable existence during the eighteenth century.  This lull was a necessary period of recuperation after exhausting wars.  The ancient Hungarian constitution, dating in its essentials from the thirteenth century, but fallen on evil days during the Turkish era, now came more and more out of abeyance.  Its fundamental principles were reaffirmed by the famous laws of Leopold II. (1790-92), and after a further relapse due to the Napoleonic wars, a long series of constitutional and linguistic reforms were introduced by successive parliaments between 1825 and 1848.

Without entering into a discussion of the Hungarian constitution, it is well to point out one factor which lies at the root of all political and constitutional development in Hungary and explains the Magyar outlook for centuries past, even up to the present day.  Till 1840 Latin was the official language of the country, and in that Latin the term for the political nation was Populus, which we would naturally translate as people.  But populus contrasted in Hungarian law with plebs, the misera plebs contribuens, that phrase of ominous meaning to describe the mass of the oppressed and unenfranchised people, the populus being the nobles, a caste which was relatively very wide, but none the less a caste, and which enjoyed a monopoly of all political power.  Till 1848 only the populus could vote, only the plebs could pay taxes—­a delightful application of the principle, “Heads I win, tails you lose!” In 1848 the distinction was broken down in theory, the franchise being extended beyond the privileged class by the initiative of that class itself.  But in effect the distinction has survived to the present day in a veiled form.  Political power, and, above all, the parliamentary franchise and the county elective bodies, continued to be a monopoly—­henceforth a monopoly of the Magyar nobility, plus those classes whom they had assimilated and attached to their cause, against the other races, forming more than half the population of Hungary.  This point of populus and plebs may seem at first sight somewhat pedantic 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.