2,000,000 Germans, including the numerous colonies on the Austrian border, the Swabians of the south, and the Saxons of Transylvania; more than 2,000,000 Slovaks, who inhabit chiefly the northwestern counties; between three and four million Rumanes, living between the Theiss and the Eastern Carpathians; some 500,000 Ruthenes, or Little Russians, who inhabit the northeastern counties; some 600,000 Serbs and Croats in the central southern counties; 100,000 Slovenes along the borders of Styria and Carinthia; and some 200,000 other non-Magyars, including about 90,000 gypsies, who speak a language of their own.  Taking the population of Hungary proper at 18,000,000, the Magyars are thus in a minority, which becomes more marked when Croatia-Slavonia with its population of 2,600,000 southern Slavs is added.

[Illustration:  Distribution of Nationalities in Hungary.]

It would have been possible for the Magyars, after the restoration of the Hungarian Constitution under the Dual Settlement of 1867, to have built up a strong and elastic Transleithan polity based on the recognition of race individualities and equality of political rights for all.  The non-Magyars would have accepted Magyar leadership the more readily in that they had been dragooned and oppressed by Austria during the period of reaction after 1849 as ruthlessly as the Magyars themselves.  Deak and Eoetvoes, who were the last prominent Magyar public men with a Hungarian, as distinguished from a narrowly Magyar, conception of the future of their country, pleaded indeed for fair treatment of the non-Magyars, and trusted to the attractive force of the strong Magyar nucleus to settle automatically the question of precedence in the State.  But in 1875, when Koloman Tisza, the father of Count Stephen Tisza, took office, these wise counsels were finally and definitely rejected in favor of what Baron Banffy afterward defined as “national Chauvinism.”  Magyarization became the watchword of the State and persecution its means of action.  Koloman Tisza concluded with the monarch a tacit pact under which the Magyar Government was to be left free to deal as it pleased with the non-Magyars as long as it supplied without wincing the recruits and the money required for the joint army.  The Magyar Parliament became almost exclusively representative of the Magyar minority of the people.  Out of the 413 constituencies of Hungary proper more than 400 were compelled, by pressure, bribery, and gerrymandering, to return Magyar or Jewish Deputies.  The press and the banks fell entirely into Jewish hands, and the Magyarized Jews became the most vociferous of the “national Chauvinists.”

Nothing like it has been seen before or since—­save the Turkish revolution of 1908, when the Young Turks, under Jewish influence, broke away from the relatively tolerant methods of the old regime and adopted the system of forcible “Turkification” that led to the Albanian insurrections of 1910-12, to the formation of the Balkan League, and to the overthrow of Turkey in Europe.