[Footnote 15:  See The History of Protestantism, by Rev. J.A.  Wylie, Part 29.]

[Footnote 16:  The Magyars; their Country and Institutions.]

CHAPTER XVIII.

Political difficulties—­Impatient criticism of foreigners—­Hungary has everything to do—­Tenant-farmers wanted—­Wages.

It is remarkable that the Saxons in Transylvania, who had suffered so much tribulation from the religious persecutions of the house of Hapsburg, preferring even to shelter themselves under the protection of the Turk, should be the first to support the tyranny of Austria against the Magyars in 1848.

I visited at the house of a village pastor, who told me he had himself led four hundred Saxons against the Hungarians at that time.  The remembrance of that era is not yet effaced; so many people not much beyond middle age had taken part in the war that the bitterness has not passed out of the personal stage.  Pacification and reconciliation, and all the Christian virtues, have been evoked; but underlying the calm surface, all the old hatreds of race still exist.  Nothing assimilates socially or politically in Hungary.  The troubled history of the past reappears in the political difficulty of the present.  And what can be done when the Magyar will not hold with the Saxon, and the Saxon cannot away with the Szekler?  Are not the ever-increasing Wallacks getting numerically ahead of the rest, while the Southern Slavs threaten the integrity of the empire?

Prosperity is the best solvent for disaffection.  When the resources of Hungary are properly developed, and wealth results to the many, bringing education and general enlightenment in its train, there will be a common ground of interest, even amongst those who differ in race, religion, and language.  It was a saying of the patriotic Count Szechenyi, and the saying has passed into a proverb, “Make money, and enrich the country; an empty sack will topple over, but if you fill it, it will stand by its own weight.”

“You call yourselves ‘the English of the East,’” I said one day to a Hungarian friend of mine; “but how is it you are not more practical, since you pay us the compliment of following our lead in many things?”

“You do not see that in many respects we are children, the Hungarians are children,” replied my friend. “‘We are not, but we shall be,’ said one of our patriots.  You Britishers are rash in your impatient criticism of a state which has not come to its full growth.  It is hardly thirty years since we emerged from the middle ages, so to speak; and you expect our civilisation to have the well-worn polish of Western States.  Think how recently we have emancipated our serfs, and reformed our constitution and our laws.  Take into account, too, that just as we were setting our house in order, the enemy was at the gate—­progress was arrested, and our national life paralysed; but let