“To the great national kitchen the Magyar contributes bread, meat, and wine; the Rusniack and Wallack, salt from the salt pits of Marmaros; the Slavonian, bacon, for Slavonia furnishes the greatest number of fattened pigs; the German gives potatoes and vegetables; the Italian, rice; the Slovack, milk, cheese, and butter, besides table-linen, kitchen utensils, and crockery ware; the Jew supplies the Hungarian with money; and the gipsy furnishes the entertainment with music.”

Coming to hard facts, the latest statistics of M. Keleti give 15,417,327 as the total population of Hungary.  Of these 2,470,000 are Wallacks, who since the nationality fever has set in desire to be called Roumains; and if you say Roman at once, they will be still better pleased.  They were in old time the overflow of Wallachia, now forming part of the Roumanian Principality.  The first historical irruption of the Wallacks was about the end of the fourteenth century, when they became a terrible pest to the German settlers in Transylvania, dreaded by them as much as Turk or Tartar.  They burned and pillaged the lands and villages of the peaceful dwellers in the Saxon settlement; but at length they had become so numerous that the law took cognisance of their existence and reduced them to a state of serfdom, from which they were not relieved till 1848.

A subject race has always its wrongs, and there is no doubt the haughty Magyar nobles treated the Wallacks with great harshness and indignity.  It was the old story—­good masters were kind to their serfs, but those less fortunate had a bad time of it, what with forced labour and other burdens.  “A lord is a lord even in hell” is the saying of the peasants.

Mr Paget[6] tells the story of an old countess he met in Transylvania, who used to lament that “times were sadly changed, peasants were no longer so respectful as they used to be; she could remember walking to church on the backs of the peasants, who knelt down in the mud to allow her to pass over them without soiling her shoes.  She could also remember, though less partial to the recollection, a rising of the peasantry, when nothing but the kindness with which her mother had generally treated them saved her from the cruel death which many of her neighbours met with.”

The rising here mentioned took place in 1784, when two Wallacks named Hora and Kloska were the leaders of a terrible onslaught upon the Magyar nobles.  The Vienna Government was accused on this occasion of being very tardy in sending troops to quell the insurrection.  It was the time when the unpopular reforms of Joseph II. were so ill received by the Magyars, and no good feeling subsisted between Hungary and the Central Government.

But the most frightful outbreak of the Wallacks was, as we all know, within living memory.  You can hear from the lips of witnesses descriptions of horrors committed not thirty years ago in Transylvania.  Entire villages were destroyed, whole families slaughtered, down to the new-born infant.