This system really secured the political power in Austria and Hungary to two races—­the Germans and the Magyars, and they, as the strongest in each country, bought off the two next strongest, the Poles and the Croats, by the grant of autonomy to Galicia and Croatia.  The remaining eight were not considered at all.  At first this ingenious device seemed to offer fair prospects of success.  But ere long—­for reasons which would lead us too far—­the German hegemony broke down in Austria, and the whole balance was disturbed.  It gradually became clear that the system was only workable when one scale was high in the air.  The history of the past forty-seven years is the history of the gradual decay of the Dual System.  Austria has progressed in many ways; her institutions have steadily grown freer, her political sense has developed, universal suffrage has been introduced, racial inequalities have been reduced though not abolished, industry, art, and general culture have advanced steadily.  But she has been continually hampered by Hungary, where racial monopoly has grown worse and worse.  The Magyar Chauvinists attempted the impossible—­the assimilation by seven million people of twelve million others.  Yet in spite of every imaginable trick—­a corrupt and oppressive administration, gross manipulation of the franchise, press persecution, the suppression of schools and ruthless restriction of every form of culture—­the non-Magyar races are stronger to-day than in 1867.  And the result of the struggle has been in Hungary a decay of political standards, a corruption of public life, such as fills even the greatest optimists with despair.

Sec.2. Hungary and Magyar Misrule.—­Such an assertion may seem to run counter to the common idea of Hungary as the home of liberty and the vanguard of popular uprisings against despotism, and it is certainly incompatible with the arrogant claim of Magyar Statesmen that “nowhere in the world is there so much freedom as in Hungary.”  At the risk of disturbing the proportion of this chapter, I propose to give a few classic illustrations of Magyar methods, selected almost at random from an overwhelming mass of damning evidence.

On paper Hungary possesses a most admirable and enlightened law guaranteeing “the Equal Rights of Nationalities” (1868); in practice, it has remained almost from the very first a dead letter.  Let us take the field of education.  Every effort, legal and illegal, has been made to Magyarise the educational system, with the result that in all the primary and secondary schools under State control Magyar is the exclusive language of instruction, while the number of denominational schools has been steadily diminished and their sphere of action, as more favourable to the non-Magyar races, materially restricted.  Fifty years ago the Slovaks, who even then numbered over two millions, possessed three gymnasia (middle schools) which they had founded and maintained by their own exertions.  In 1875