The arms of the Wallacks were supplied by Austria, for whom they were acting as a sort of militia at the time of Hungary’s war of independence.  The Vienna Government has been very fond of playing off the Wallacks and the Slavs against the Magyars:  they have kept the pot always simmering; if some fine day it boils over, they will have the fat in the fire.

Of course in Southern Hungary one hears enough about the Panslavic movement, and Panslavic ideas.  “The idea of Panslavism had a purely literary origin,” observes Sir Gardiner Wilkinson in his book on Dalmatia.  “It was started by Kolla, a Protestant clergyman of the Slavonic congregation at Pesth, who wished to establish a national literature by circulating all works written in the various Slavonic dialects....  The idea of an intellectual union of all these nations naturally led to that of a political one; and the Slavonians seeing that their numbers amounted to about one-third of the whole population of Europe, and occupied more than half its territory, began to be sensible that they might claim for themselves a position to which they had not hitherto aspired.”

But the Wallacks, or, as we will now call them, Roumains, are not Slavs at all; they are utterly distinct in race, though they are co-religionists with the Southern Slavs.  “The Roumanians,” says Mr Freeman,[7] “speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slave nor Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin not to any of their neighbours, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain.”  He is inclined to think these so-called Dacians are the surviving representatives of the great Thracian race.

Who they were is, after all, not so important a question as what they are, these two millions and a half of Roumains in Hungary.  To put the statistical figures in another way, Mr. Boner,[8] writing in 1865, calculates that the Roumains, naturalised in Southern Hungary, number 596 out of every 1000 souls in Transylvania.  The fecundity of the race is remarkable, they threaten to overwhelm the Saxons, whose numbers, on the other hand, are seriously on the decrease.  They are also supplanting the Magyars in Southern Hungary.

I have myself seen villages which I was told had been exclusively Magyar, but which are now as exclusively Roumain.  It is even possible to find churches where the service conducted in the Magyar tongue has ceased to be understood by the congregation.

To meet a Roumain possessed even of the first rudiments of education is an exception to the rule:  even their priests are deplorably ignorant; but when we find them in receipt of such a miserable stipend as 100 florins, indeed in some cases 30 florins a-year, it speaks for itself that they belong to the poorest class.  The Wallacks lead their lives outside the pale of civilisation; they are without the wants and desires of a settled life.  Very naturally the manumission of the serfs in 1848 found them utterly unprepared for their political freedom.  Neither by nature or by tradition are they law-respecting; in fact, they are very much the reverse.