No law of association exists in Hungary, and the government uses its arbitrary powers to prohibit or suppress even such harmless organisations as temperance societies, choral unions, or women’s leagues.  Perhaps the most notorious examples are the dissolution of the Slovak Academy in 1875 and of the Roumanian National Party’s organisation in 1894; but the treatment meted out to trades unions and working-class organisations, both Magyar and non-Magyar, for years past, has been equally scandalous.  The right of assembly is no less precarious in a country where parliamentary candidates are arrested or expelled from their constituencies, where deputies are prevented from addressing their constituents, where an electoral address is often treated as a penal offence.

As for Hungary’s electoral system, the less said the better.  Gerrymandering, a narrow and complicated franchise, bribery and corruption on a gigantic scale, the wholesale use of troops and gendarmes to prevent opposition voters from reaching the polls, the cooking of electoral rolls, illegal disqualifications, sham counts, official terrorism, and in many cases actual bloodshed—­such are but a few of the methods which preserve a political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities.  Small wonder, then, if the non-Magyar races of Hungary, who on a basis of population would have had 198 deputies, never were allowed to elect more than 25, and if even this scanty number was at the infamous elections of 1910 reduced by terrorism and corruption to eight!

In judicial matters the situation is no less galling.  Petitions are not accepted in the courts, unless drawn up in Magyar, and the whole proceedings are invariably conducted in the same language.  The non-Magyar “stands like an ox” before the courts of his native land, and a whole series of provisions exists for his repression, notably the monstrous paragraphs dealing with “action hostile to the State,” with the “incitement of one nationality against another” and with the “glorification of a criminal action”—­applied with rigorous severity to all political opponents of Magyarisation but never to its advocates.  Let me cite one classic example of the latter.  In 1898 a well-known Slovak editor was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment for two articles severely criticising the Magyarisation of place-names in Hungary.  On his return from prison he was met at the railway station of the little county town by a crowd of admirers:  songs were sung, a short speech of welcome was delivered and a bouquet of flowers was presented.  The sequel of this perfectly orderly incident was that no fewer than twenty-four persons, including Mr. Hurban the leading Slovak poet, were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying from fourteen days to six months.  The three girls who had presented the flowers were let off with a fine of L16.