all three were arbitrarily closed by orders of the Hungarian Government, and since that date the unhappy Slovaks have not been allowed a single secondary school in which their own language is taught, while the number of their primary schools has been reduced from 1821 in 1869 to 440 in 1911.  The deliberate aim is, of course, to prevent the growth of a Slovak middle class.  It is quite a common thing for schoolboys to be persecuted or even dismissed for showing Slovak proclivities or even talking their mother—­tongue “ostentatiously” on the street.  Only last year a brilliant young Slovak student, known to me personally, was deprived by the Magyar authorities of a scholarship in Oriental languages, for no other reason than that he was “untrustworthy in a national sense"![1] Such instances are even more frequent among the Roumanians of Hungary.  A specially notorious case occurred in March 1912 at Grosswardein, when sixteen Roumanian theological students were expelled from the Catholic seminary for the “demonstrative use” of their language, which was regarded as offensive by their fellow-students and professors!

[Footnote 1:  This document is in my possession.]

Linguistic restrictions are carried to outrageous lengths.  There is not a single inscription in any language save Magyar in any post office or railway station throughout Hungary.  Slovak medals and stamps, produced in America and bearing such treasonable inscriptions as “For our Slovak language” and “I am proud to be a Slovak,” have been confiscated in Hungary.  Only Magyar inscriptions are tolerated on the tombstones of the Budapest cemeteries.  The erection of monuments to Roumanian or Slovak patriots has more than once been prohibited, and the funds collected have been arbitrarily seized and applied to Magyar purposes.  National colours, other than the Magyar, are strictly forbidden.  Two years ago, at the funeral of a Roumanian poet at Kronstadt (Transylvania) gendarmes pressed up to the hearse and clipped off the colours from a wreath which had been sent by the Society of Journalists in Bucarest.  About the same time a nurse was sent to prison because a child of three was found wearing a Roumanian tricolor bow, and its parents were reprimanded and fined.  Last July on the very eve of war, fifteen theological students, returning to Bucarest from an excursion into Transylvania, were arrested at the frontier by Hungarian gendarmes, hauled by main force out of the train, sent back to Hermannstadt and kept for days in gaol; their offence consisted in waving some Roumanian tricolors from the train windows as they steamed out of the last station in Hungary!