On Fri, 28 Jul 1995, John Czifra wrote:
> To all Magyar's,
> People out there
> still think that the so-called "Romanian Revolution" was started by the
> Romanian people because Bucharest got all the press while ethnic Hungarians
> were getting gunned down by the Securitate in Temesvar. Then the "pogrom" at
> Marosvasarhely barely got press. A few ethnic Hungarians getting beat down
> wasn't good enough of a story to warrant further investigation by anyone. The
n
> there was the soccer match in Slovakia between Ferencvaros and a Slovakian
> team, which erupted in ethnic violence, but since it was a soccer
> match..........who cares?? It happens in soccer.

I don't know where you were, but I recall the Romanian revolution being
started by a crowd of Romanians and Hungarians rallying around Tokes
Laszlo. This occurrance was plastered on the front pages of all Toronto
newspapers and also the New York Times. When the shooting started in
Pukaresti, of course attention went there, but each news article also
mentioned shooting and deaths elsewhere -- the reports of Stanulescu
tripping up the Timosvar to settle things down. I recall the Turgu Mures
events getting wide publicity in all the newspapers here and also in the
New York Times which in addition to news published an analysis of the
event. In the five-plus years since I haven't read of further group
murders -- have there been murders involving troops, lorries full of
miners, etc. I think more violence has been done against the Gypsies in
Romania since the revolution than against the Magyars, and their plight
gets virtually no press whatsoever. Gypsy villages have been plundered
and burned, by Romanians and by Hungarians in Romania, and continuing
attacks against Gypsies by Hungarian skimheads. This is virtually a
pogrom and deserves publicity. Take a ride on the fekete vonat and rant
your opinions there.

> Maps in the Hungarian
> American Athletic Club showed the former Hungary, in its splendor.

Yes, the British Empire had its splendor also -- and the Romans. Those
days are long gone and gone forever.

> People
> looking at places in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia that their
> ancestors came from while Ceaucescu's bulldozers were erasing the very soul
 and
> identity of that town by razing.

When I looked into this, the majority of villages that were bulldozed
were Romanian, and of the villages, most were in the outlying district
around Pukeresti.

> their own special "Hungarian interest groups" and worry more about the common
> cause of self-determination for ethnic Hungarians everywhere, then maybe we'd
> get more action.
> Yours, Czifra Jancsi

What kind of action are you referring to? Nothing undemocratic I hope?

Wally Keeler                                    Poetry
Creative Intelligence Agency                    is
Peoples Republic of Poetry                      Poetency

I agree in many things you have said.  First, you may look at who is
really heading Hungary's government today.  Many of them are from the old
guard, only that they were silent then.  And there seems to be quite a
hypocracy in the slogan "proud to be a Hungarian", for people here are too
far from the experiences of East European Magyars to realize what is
happening.  Even those few who have really been forced to move, these
memories of oppression is fading away.  It is hard for many to admit, so
it is only my impression.

People are very much affected by what the news say here (i.e., lies).
First of all, nobody admits in the West that the UN presence is a cover-up.
I think it should be the French and the British who should continue the
mop-up of what they have done after World War I.  They insisted on
splitting Hungary up, and they insisted on creating that time bomb which
the naive Slavs called Yugoslavia.  Let the French and British clean up
their mess.  So far nobody has even brought up the minority in the
Vajdasag (pardon...Vojvodina) for they also feel the pressure.  It is bad
for the Bosnians (who, we know, are Slavs, but the West does not want to
admit that they have forced two factions of the Slav people into living
together) too, because they have been labeled as "Muslims", their
image further denigrated in the eyes of the World...And these are the people
(the "West") that Hungary wants to join.  I fear that will have further
consequences.  As the EU is really another name for the combination of
anglo- and francomanias, it will lead to further justification of cultural
genocide in the Eastern European region.  The West does not care because
they can sell their weapons through underground channels.  why do you
think they have so successfully held up the embago?  So that their bloody
weapons can bring them more  revenue.  The EU will mean more exploitation
for all East European nation, and greater French/British domianance.  Why
do you think that other Western European nations protest the current
terms of the EU (I think it was the Danish or the Dutch few years ago. So
much for now.

On Fri, 28 Jul 1995, John Czifra wrote:

> To all Magyar's,
>
>
>  I can not be patient no more. I'm sick and tired of reading articles about
> things that other countries do to screw the Hungarians. It's bad enough that
> Hungarians, in Hungary, have been making a field day of screwing each other,
> since 1989, making the debt even more impossible to pay, but that's another
> discussion. Anyway, I can't believe that we (Hungarians) can just sit back an
d
> watch the decimation of the Hungarians go by without any true action. Instead
,
> we let the Hungarian government sell out 600,000 ethnic Hungarians to Slovaki
a
> to do as they please with them because the EU says so and would jeopardize
> Hungary's standing. What about the standing of those ethnic Hungarians?? Will
> those in Romania suffer the same fate?? Didn't you folks see the Benes D
> ecree's, that someone sent out to us a couple months ago?? Doesn't that scare
> you, that things haven't changed, since 1945?? Actually, things are speeding
 up
> on all fronts. It's almost hard to keep track of what's going on, but
> anti-Hungarian activities are on the rise. These goings on will never get the
> proper press they should be getting, if we sit around on it. People out there
> still think that the so-called "Romanian Revolution" was started by the
> Romanian people because Bucharest got all the press while ethnic Hungarians
> were getting gunned down by the Securitate in Temesvar. Then the "pogrom" at
> Marosvasarhely barely got press. A few ethnic Hungarians getting beat down
> wasn't good enough of a story to warrant further investigation by anyone. The
n
> there was the soccer match in Slovakia between Ferencvaros and a Slovakian
> team, which erupted in ethnic violence, but since it was a soccer
> match..........who cares?? It happens in soccer.
> It burns me up that there is nothing being done about it, by us. It's a shame
> that we are not more vocal about this. We can not let the fate of a couple
> million be determined by a few old crocks in the sell-out Hungarian Parliment
> and the EU. This matter is worse than what Hungarians faced with Ceaucescu.
 Now
> they've got worse at all fronts. The problem is that Hungarians (abroad and i
n
> Hungary) have a hard time uniting for anything. There's always a lot of talk,
> but no action. The best example being the poor showing at the Ceaucescu
> Demonstration at Washington, DC in 1988, especially the New Brunswick, NJ
> contingent. We had only a half a bus load of people show up. There were hardl
y
> any young people, except myself, on that bus. It's a damn shame that out all
> the Hungarians in the New Brunswick area that could of made a difference that
> day, only half a bus load of people showed. Unreal. Only a few weeks before
> that New Brunswick was crawling with Hungarians stuffing themselves with
> langos, kolbasz, and pecsenye wearing Hungary T-shirts, 1956 T-shirts, and
> Erdely T-shirts claiming their sense of Hungarian pride. Maps in the Hungaria
n
> American Athletic Club showed the former Hungary, in its splendor. People
> looking at places in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia that their
> ancestors came from while Ceaucescu's bulldozers were erasing the very soul
 and
> identity of that town by razing. "I'm proud to be Hungarian!!" buttons sold
> like hotcakes, but how proud were those people?? That's my question. Things
> haven't changed at all in the Hungarian community. Sure, there plenty of new
> and exciting things that have come up, but still, Hungarians, have their own
> special events that they go to. They go these things and not those things and
> normally don't socialize with those who go to "those other things". It's all
> crap!! If they would stop worrying about their greedy self-indulgences and
> their own special "Hungarian interest groups" and worry more about the common
> cause of self-determination for ethnic Hungarians everywhere, then maybe we'd
> get more action.
>
> Thanks for reading my rant.
>
> Yours,
> Czifra Jancsi
>

Szia Tibor,
lagalabb virtualisan talalkozzunk migegyszer.
\dvvzlet:
Bila Bicsbvl

What average people feel about the communists? Is any possibility that the
Soviets ever will
return? Do average people feel a new ,good life is possible?
George Kantor

John Czifra > wrote:
>Maps in the Hungarian
>American Athletic Club showed the former Hungary, in its splendor.

Well, let's review a little bit the last years of that period.
I will follow here the British historian Robert Williams
Seton-Watson (1879-1951), although there are some other books
presenting roughly the same _facts_ , like, e.g.,  Keith
Hitchins' "Rumania". The book I refer to will be "A history of the
Roumanians, from Roman times to the completion of unity".
Seton Watson has got indeed a clue about what exactly lied
behind that `splendour'.

We cannot understand each other unless the mistakes of the
past are reviewed and acknowledged from both directions.

Mihai Caragiu


         ==================================
        | Dr. Mihai Caragiu                |
        | Institute of Mathematics         |
        | Romanian Academy of Sciences     |
        | e-mail:  |
         ==================================






 SETON-WATSON, ROBERT WILLIAM (1879-1951)
 ============================================

Reference : "The National Dictionary of Biography"
Oxford University Press, 1971, E.T. Williams,
Helen M. Palmer, editors.

["The Times", 28 July, 1951 ; G.H.Bolsover, in "Proceedings
of the British Academy", vol. xxxvii, 1951; private
information.] text by WICKAM STEED


> ===============================================================
<<<
  SETON-WATSON, ROBERT WILLIAM (1879-1951), historian,
was born in London 20 August 1879, the only child of
William Livingston Watson, a well-to-do Scottish
merchant in Calcutta and London and a landowner in
Scotland, and his wife, Elisabeth Lindsay, daughter
of the Scottish genealogist George Seton. His mother
was an invalid and his upbringing was entrusted to a
female relative whose strict disciplime may have
accounted in part for an apparent diffidence of manner
which he never quite overcome. Behind this manner lay
passionate devotion to what he felt to be right and
true, and a temperament in which his father's cautious
shrewdness and his mother's idealism were curiously
blended. Winchester, under a famous headmaster, and
New College, Oxford, where H.A.L.Fisher was his tutor,
set their stamp on him and encouraged him to follow
his bent for exact historical research.
Before taking his degree with a first class in modern history
in 1902 he revealed his talent by winning the Stanhope historical
essay prize in 1901. He next spent a winter at Berlin
University, a year at Sorbonne
>>>


=====


1922: Masaryk professor of Central European history at King's
College, London, after having been for some years an honorary lecturer
in East European history.

With Sir Bernard Pares he founded and edited the "Slavonic Review"
and helped the eventual establishment of the School as a
`central activity' of the university.

In 1928 : Creighton lecturer in the University of London

In 1931 : Raleigh lecturer to the British Academy

Since 1932 : Fellow of British Academy

In 1939 he delivered the Montague Burton lecture at the University College,
Notthingham.

In 1945 he became President of the Royal Historical Society

1945: appointed first Professor of Czechoslovak studies at Oxford.

Doctor Honoris Causa at : Prague (1919), Zagreb (1920), Bratislava (1928),
Belgrade (1928), Cluj (1930), Birmingham (1946)

In Romania (1920) the chamber of deputies suspended
its sitting to acclaim him when he appeared in the gallery...

<<
He was a dear soul, tender and sensitive,
tenacious and righteous, prudent and brave.
On relinquishing his chair at Oxford in
1949 he was elected as honorary fellow
of both New College  and Brasenose and
retired to his country home Kyle House
in the Isle of Skye - where in happier
days he could indulge a modest taste
for yachting and sea fishing - until
he died there 25 July 1951.
>>


Selected publications:

[1]  The Balkans, Italy and the Adriatic. / Seton-Watson, R. W. n.d.
[2]  Britain in Europe, 1789-1914, a survey of foreign policy. / Seton-Watson,
          R. W. 1938.
[3]  Dalmatia and the Jugoslav movement. / Vojnovic, Lujo. [1920].
[4]  Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern question, a study in diplomacy and
          party politics. / Seton-Watson, R. W. 1935.
[5]  From Munich to Danzig. / Seton-Watson, R. W. Being the 3d ed., rev. and
          much enl., of 'Munich and the dictators'. [1939].
[6]  German, Slav, and Magyar, a study in the origins of the great war. /
          Seton-Watson, R. W. 1916.
[7]  A history of medieval Austria. / Leeper, Alexander Wigram Allen. 1941.
[8]  A history of the Czechs and Slovaks. / Seton-Watson, R. W. 1965.
[9]  A history of the Roumanians, from Roman times to the completion of unity.
              / Seton-Watson, R. W. 1934.
[10] Masaryk in England. / Seton-Watson, R. W. 1943.
[11] The new Slovakia. / Seton-Watson, R. W. 1924.
[12] Prague essays, presented by a group of British historians to the Caroline
          University of Prague on the occasion of its six-hundredth
          anniversary. / Seton-Watson, R. W. [1969, c1949].
[13] Racial problems in Hungary. / Seton-Watson, R. W. 1972.
[14] The rise of nationality in the Balkans. / Seton-Watson, R. W. 1917.
[15] Slovakia then and now, a political survey by many Slovak authors. /
          Seton-Watson, R. W. [1931].
[16] The southern Slav question and the Habsburg monarchy. / Seton-Watson, R.
          W. 1911.
[17] The tombs of the popes, landmarks in papal history. / Gregorovius,
          Ferdinand. 1903.
[18] Tudor studies, presented by the Board of Studies in History in the
          University of London to Albert Frederick Pollard, being the work of
          twelve of his colleagues and pupils. / London. University. Board of
          Studies in History. [1969].




All the six postings that follow refer to :

 "A history of the Roumanians, from Roman times to the completion of unity"
 by R. W. Seton-Watson. Cambridge [Eng.], The University press, 1934.
 viii, 596 p. XVI pl.(port.,incl.front.)fold.map. 25 cm.

Lajos Kossuth and the 1848 moment (I)
                  =====================================

Step by step the Magyar nationalists wrung fresh legislative concessions
from the crown: and in 1843 Parliament introduced Magyar as the exclusive
language of the legislature, the Government and official business, and also,
in theory, of public instruction, though this latter decision was left to
be worked out in detail and was therefore still hanging over the non-Magyar
races as a sword of Damocles, when the supreme crisis of 1848 arrived. Popular
enthusiasm for the "national language", as Magyar was now habitually called in
this most polyglot of European states, was fanned to fever by Louis Kossuth -
himself the son of a Magyarised Slovak "gentry" family. The mad illusion that
Hungary could be Magyarised at a stroke of a pen - a proposition which at that
time was equivalent to every two Magyars in existence securing three renegade
recruits for their nation - revealed itself in the repressive measures of the
fourties against Slovak nationalism, in systematic attempts to use churches as
instruments of the Magyar propaganda, and abova all in the Parliament's
attitude
towards Croatia [...]

In the autumn of 1846 the Transylvanian Diet again met, and in the following
July introduced and adopted a comprehensive Language Law, by which
the Magyar became the language for the Gubernium, the Diet, the law-courts,
and for the entire administration in the teritory of the Magyar and Sze'kely
nations. [...]

May 29, 1848 - the diet opened at Cluj (Kolozsvar) [...] The Romanian majority
was not represented, and the tiny remnant of twenty-two saxons were terrorised
into compliance, though reserving their their existing traditional and
linguistic rights and municipal institutions.

August 24, 1848: Baron Wessele'nyi pleaded the Romanian cause in a memorable
speech [...]

Unhappily the effect of this noble appeal was destroyed by Wessele'nyi's
former ally Kossuth, who spoke of the Romanians as "the spirit of conspiracy
against Hungary", and refused to recognise the special existence of Serb,
Wallach or Slovak, still less to fill official posts on a basis of nationality,
since that would be an attack upon "the unitary state".

The general attitude of the Romanians to the trial of strength between
Hungary and Austria, of which their question was as yet but a fragment, was a
logical sequence from their earlier attitude under Joseph and Leopold. They
looked above all to the dinasty for equality and justice, openly repudiating
the accusations of reactionary leanings and declaring their belief in a
constitutional monarchy, in which all the nations had they share [...]


Bem followed up his victories by an attempt at civil administration, and as
his main principles were conciliation and amnesty, he at once came into
accute conflict with Kossuth, who now dominated the Government in Pest and
Debreczen, and his delegate Csanyi, who declared Bem's amnesty to be invalid
and set up military tribunals to execute "traitors" and confiscate their
property. Csanyi's manifesto to the Romanians is a clssic revelation of the
Kossuthist mentality. It would deserve to be quoted in full, but a few
sentences
must suffice. It begins at the top note: "You, unhappy Wallachs, deceived
and led into false paths by intrigues and by Austrian officers. There is no
trace in human memory or in the pages of history of a free national life on
your part. You were slaves under the Romans, slaves under the migrant people,
slaves too in the last 1000 years, and only the Magyars have extended to you
also in the past year the dawn of liberty..." They have given the peasant
equal rights, but "indulgence has its limits" [...]. Kossuth's attitude
towards the Saxons and the Romanians does not stand alone. On the eve of
the revolution he had in open Parliament scoffed at Croatia as "so small that
it is not enough for a breakfast". He had met the demands of a Serbian
deputation in the early summer of 1848 with the fatal phrase "Then the sword
will decide between us". He had roused Serbian indignation still further
by his plan for settling the Sze'kels in the Banat, and a year later he was
writing to Bem that "among the Serbs the only surety is to take the women,
children and priests as hostages".

But worst of all was the terrorist attitude
towards his own people of origin, the Slovaks [...].
Kossuth's large measure of responsability for the
racial war cannot seriously be denied.[...]




 ------------------------------------------
 Reference:  "A history of the Roumanians,
 from Roman times to the completion of unity"
 by R. W. Seton-Watson. Cambridge [Eng.], The University press, 1934.
 viii, 596 p. XVI pl.(port.,incl.front.)fold.map. 25 cm.

Lajos Kossuth and the 1848 moment (II)
                  =======================================


Already in March Maghieru, from his exile in Baden, had written to Kossuth,
warning
him of the imminence of Russian intervention and pleading for a
Magyar-Romanian alliance, but subject to the recognition of the
nationality and political rights of all Romanians under the hungarian crown,
through an official "organic Statute" and on a federalist basis.
Kossuth only received this overture when the victories of Dembinski and
Gorgei had fired him with optimism: he rejected it and ordered measures to
crush Iancu's resistance. But meanwhile Balcescu found a hearing with Szemere
and Casimir Batthyany, and a draft convention was submitted, providing for the
recognition of the Romanian name, for free use of the language in church,
school and local assembly, a national Guard and autonomy for both Churches.
This time Kossuth accepted in principle, though a few days earlierhe had
said: "For the Romanians I have only bullets and cannon".

On his side Butean, Iancu's right hand, has shown complete scepticism and had
answered Balcescu's appeal for a united front against Russians with the bitter
words, " Your freedom is the gallows, your equal rights means that the
other nations who share the soil with them should be swallowed up by the
Magyar element" His doubts were soon to be hideously confirmed.[...]

It was now decided to send a deputy Dragos, a Romanian of Magyar sentiments,
on a mission to negotiate a compromise with Iancu: but his motives and
prospects of success may be gathered from Kossuth's letter of instructions
to him, denouncing Saguna as a traitor on whose head rested the the bloodshed
of the civil war and to whom pardon could never be granted! While, then, Dragos
was actually treating with Iancu and Butean, another confident of Kossuth,
Major Hatvani, with a detachment of 1500 men, broke in upon them and, in
clear violation of the armistice just concluded, arrested a number of the
Romanian leaders. The prefect Butean was hanged next day, and his
colleague Dobra disappeared and was never heard of again. Iancu, naturally
regarding this as an arrant treachery, made an armed attack, sacked the town
of Abrudba'nya, and put Hatvani to flight; and it has been alledged that
as many as 4000 persons were massacred, though this is almost certainly an
enormous exaggeration. Dragos, suspected of treachery, though probably quite
innocent, was cut down and killed. This ended all hope of conciliation, and
Iancu held out in his mountains until the Russo-Austrian troops could advance.
Bem's passing hope of winning armed support from Wallachia met with no response
whatsoever, mainly because of the Magyar intransigent attitude. [...]



 ------------------------------------------
 Reference:  "A history of the Roumanians,
 from Roman times to the completion of unity"
 by R. W. Seton-Watson. Cambridge [Eng.], The University press, 1934.
 viii, 596 p. XVI pl.(port.,incl.front.)fold.map. 25 cm.

Ausgleich : the Dualism (I)
                  ============================

The abrupt fall of Schmerling in the summer of 1865 was soon followed
by the dissolution of the Hermannstadt Diet and the annulment of all its
legislation - and therefore of the law assuring equal rights to the Romanians,
which, it is true, had never been carried into actual force. A new Diet was
convoked at Koloszvar, on the old unreformed franchise, so modified as not
to exclude the Romanians altogether, but to assure an overwhelming Magyar
majority [...] The Magyars, who the formed only 29% of the population, elected
89 deputies as against 31 Saxons and only 13 Romanians, while out of the
190 Regalists they had 132 -with the result thart they easily outnumbered
Saxons and Romanians combined [...] The Diet met with re-endorsement of the
Union as its sole agenda, and the Magyar majority forthwith an address
to the crown in this sense, requesting that Transylvanian representatives
should be summoned to tha Parliament of Budapest [...] It was not until
February
1867 that Andrassy was appointed first premier of the new
constitutional Hungary. The Ausgleich or Compromise, making the empire
of Austria and the Apostolic Kingdom of Hungary two equal sovereign states,
only linked by certain common affairs at home, but forming a single unit
to the outer world, obtained parliamentary sanction in March [...] In
Hungary [...] while Croatia was allowed to preserve her ancient autonomy
under new forms, the other non-Magyar nationalities - Germans, Slovaks,
Ruthens, Serbs, and not least of all Romanians - were relegated to the
position of mere political helots and predestined for assimilation
by the ruling race.


"The secondary school", wrote a well-known Magyar political writer,
Bela Grunwald, the accomplice of Koloman Tisza in destroying the Slovak
Gymnasia, "is like a huge machine, at one end of which the Slovak youths are
thrown in by hundreds, and at the other end of which they come out as Magyars"

The Romanians took their part in the parliamentary debates. The classical
plea of Alexander Mocsonyi (30 June 1870) in favour of racial equality
and compromise - listened to with marked attention by Dea'k himself - was
the last speech of its kind from non-Magyar benches. Already one deputy had
already warned them that "those whom the Act of Union does not please
can emigrate, but he who remains must make the best of it". The appeals
of Saxon and Romanian alike were more and more greeted by cries of
"Go to Dresden" or "Go to Bucharest": their request for a subvention
for a Romanian national theatre was rejected almost as an insult.

With Dea'k in retirement, Eotvos dead, and Andrassy transferred as foreign
minister to the Ballplatz, Koloman Tisza came rapidly to the front as leader
of the reconstituted Liberal party, and for the fifteen years of his
premiership (1875-1890) was far more truly dictator than Kossuth or Dea'k
had ever been, establishing his predominance on a far-reaching system
of electoral corruption and administrative trickery. The Magyars of the central
plain had always formed the backbone of Kossuth's following, and still elected
many deputies of the Party of Independence. Tisza therefore hit upon the
ingenious method of turning the parliamentary scale by his control of the
non-Magyar districts of the periphery: and for this purpose the
non-Magyars either had to be reduced to complete subservience
or kept from the polls by special devices. This explains the revised
Electoral Law of 1874, which, in the words of the official government organ,
was so involved that "the confusion of Babel had really been erected into
law" Gerrymandering, unequal distribution, a highly complicated franchise,
public voting, inadequate legal checks upon corruption and a deliberate
mobilisation of officialdom in favour of the Government candidates - all this
combined in order to produce Koloman Tisza's famous "Mameluke" system. This
law still further increased the difficulties of election for non-Magyar
candidates and did more than anything else to turn the scale in favour of
abstention [...] the Romanians and Slovaks adopted and maintained the fatal
policy of passivity. [...]


 ------------------------------------------
 Reference:  "A history of the Roumanians,
 from Roman times to the completion of unity"
 by R. W. Seton-Watson. Cambridge [Eng.], The University press, 1934.
 viii, 596 p. XVI pl.(port.,incl.front.)fold.map. 25 cm.

Ausgleich  : the Dualism (II)
                  =============================



In the following winter the Serb deputy Dr. Polit ventured to interpelate the
premier on this drastic action and to suggest that the funds should at least
be restored to the original donors, in other words, to the Slovak nation. It
was on this occasion, that Tisza made his famous retort "There is no Slovak
nation". Less known is his earlier sally against the Romanian deputy Vincent
Babes, who had urged the non-Magyars also should be taught their national
history in school, There was no such thing as a "national" history of the
non-Magyars, Tisza hotly contented. The reason why Babes hated the magyars
(here he begged the question) was clearly enough: he had always gone to a
non-Magyar, to a German, school, if indeed he had ever visited a school
at all!

While in Hungary proper the the Liberal press law passed in 1848 was
revived after 1867, Transylvania was left saddled with the reactionary old
press law which had been imposed by an arbitrary decree under
the Bach regime. This gave public prosecutors special discretionary
powers, which he was able to use against the Romanian press. This is one
reason why the leading Romanian newspapers of the Dualist period
came to be published in Arad and Budapest.

While in Hungary proper the the Liberal press law passed in 1848 was
revived after 1867, Transylvania was left saddled with the reactionary old
press law which had been imposed by an arbitrary decree under
the Bach regime. This gave public prosecutors special discretionary
powers, which he was able to use against the Romanian press. This is one
reason why the leading Romanian newspapers of the Dualist period
came to be published in Arad and Budapest.


Another peculiarity of the regime was the establishment, in 1871, by
ministerial order, of special Jury Courts for press offences. The
high income qualification for jurymen deliberately handicapped the
Romanians, who were man for man so much poorer, and thus left the courts
mainly in the hands of Magyars and Saxons. But as in Hermannstadt the
jurymen were mainly Saxons, and often acquitted the Romanian editors
brought before them, the minister of the interior abolished that court
in 1885* , and Romanian cases came before the ultra-chauvinistic court
of Koloszvar [...]

___________________________________

 * In Feb 1885 there occured the centenary of the execution of Horea
   and Closca, and the veteran historian Baritiu wrote an article in the
   "Observatoriul", to the effect that the event could only be celebrated
   "after a Hungarian Plevna, when the Romanian nation recovered
   those inalienable rights and liberty of which the Dualist Pact
   had robbed it". The court in Sibiu acquitted him on 13 December 1884.

The wellknown deputy Helfy (formerly Heller) boldly argued that "there should
be no nationalities, but only a Magyar nation" [...]

Orban, after contrasting the modest claims of the Magyars with the action
of the English, "who have violently Anglicised ten million Irishmen and
Scotsmen" (SIC), declared that the new law would only be effective if beside
the Magyar-speaking teacher were placed the Magyar-feeling and Magyar-speaking
priest. [...]



In 1883 the same tendencies were applied to the secondary education, and
here their success was really phenomenal. On the eve of this law there were
151 "middle schools" in Hungary, of all categories, and of these all save
fourteen were Magyar. By 1903 the number had risen to 190, but the 39 new
institutions were exclusively Magyar [...]

Meanwhile the Romanian language was not tolerated officially. Public notices,
and even danger warnings, whether on a railway, in a post-office or on the
streets, were exclusively Magyar. Expulsions were frequent, from schools or
seminaries, of young men who dared to use their mother tongue, or to
speak it "ostentatiously" in the streets [...]

There were continual incidents due to the prohibition of Romanian songs or
national colours. A classical example was that of the funeral of Muresianu,
the poet of "Desteapta-te Romane" (Romanian, Awake!). A wreath decorated with
the Romanian tricolour had been sent by the Society of Journalists in
Bucharest, but as the coffin was being carried to the hearse, gendarmes
appeared and forcibly removed the colours [...]


 ------------------------------------------
 Reference:  "A history of the Roumanians,
 from Roman times to the completion of unity"
 by R. W. Seton-Watson. Cambridge [Eng.], The University press, 1934.
 viii, 596 p. XVI pl.(port.,incl.front.)fold.map. 25 cm.

Ausgleich  : the Dualism (III)
                  ==============================


At the same time constant pressure was put upon all non-Magyars, especially
those in subordinate positions, to Magyarise their family names, and the
ease with which this could be done gave rise to the nickname of
"Crown Magyars" (the price of registration being one krone). But while Hungary
thus was rapidly filled with Magyarised Slavs and Germans in high positions,
and while Jews availed themselves of the opportunity by thousands, it is
remarkable that the Romanians once more opposed the most stubborn resistance.
The number of Romanian renegades was relatively small, and this is one
reason why the number of Romanian officials so steadily decreased. In all the
long lists of public men in Hungary who have taken fresh names since 1867,
hardly a Romanian is to be found: and it became more and more the practice
among Romanian intellectuals in Hungary not only to give their children
specially Romanian or Roman Christian names, but wherever possible to
select such names as do not lend themselves to Magyarisation. Julius
becomes Gyula, alexander Sandor, but nothing could be made out of
Octavian, Virgil, Ovid, Tiberius, Hortensia, Lucretia, Caius, and so


During the whole period under review Koloszvar (Cluj) was the centre
of the Magyarising current in its most exaggerated and aggressive
form. It was in this spirit that a new university was founded
there in 1876: and at it the Romanians were only in
sufferance, though the disabilities imposed upon students going from
Hungary to foreign universities made it almost impossible for young
Romanians to escape from the hateful atmosphere and study at Bucharest or
Vienna - just as the Slovaks found it hard to make their way to Prague and
on their return found all avenues closed to them as "Panslavs"[...] The
Magyar nobility had town houses and gave the social tone [...]


They also made it (Cluj) the centre of the "Emke"
(Transylvanian Magyar Cultural League), the richest and more active of a group
of similar bodies, whose whole "raison d'etre" was Magyarisation in every
sphere of public life.

 ------------------------------------------
 Reference:  "A history of the Roumanians,
 from Roman times to the completion of unity"
 by R. W. Seton-Watson. Cambridge [Eng.], The University press, 1934.
 viii, 596 p. XVI pl.(port.,incl.front.)fold.map. 25 cm.

The Trial
                         =============


...The controversy was beginning to widen. We have already seen that in the
year
1891 the Romanian Cultural League was founded in Bucharest as the direct
result of the ill-treatment of the Romanians north of the Carpathians,
and as an answer to the activities of various Magyar cultural leagues.
The main initiative came from a group of teachers and students at the two
Romanian universities, and the latter circulated a manifesto which aimed at
enlisting foreign opinion on the side of the non-Magyars.
A no less outspoken "Reply", published by the
magyar students of Budapest, led the younger
generation of Romanians in their turn to abandon the mistaken passivity of
their fathers and to issue, under the title of
"The Romanian Question in Transylvania and in Hungary" a lengthy "Replique",
describing with a great array of detailed information and legal argument,
but often in tactless and provocative language, the many wrongs and
grievances of their race. The only result was to draw upon their heads a
savage sentence from the jury court of Koloszvar - Aurel Popovici, the
student mainly responsible for the Replique, being sentenced to five years,
and N.Roman, as director of the printing press, to one year's imprisonment,
for incitement against the Magyar nationality [...]

It was in this sort of atmosphere, and in the view of an impeding general
election that a fresh party conference took place at Sibiu on 20 January 1892
and resolved the long postponed memorial to the crown [...] On 1 June a
deputation of 300 Romanians conveyed this "Memorandum" to the Hofburg in
Vienna;
but not merely were they not admitted to an audience with Francis Joseph,
but some weeks later the document was returned to them unopened by the
Hungarian premier, Count Szapary, with the remark that its signatories
had no legal right to speak in the name of "Hungarian citizens of Romanian
tongue"!  In July, it is true, in answer to an interpellation, the minister
of Justice, Szilagyi, admitted the clear constitutional right of all citizens
to petition the crown, even for illegal things, and for a time the
Government wavered in its attitude. But eventually the chauvinistic current
definitely gained the upper hand, and as meanwhile the rejected document
had been printed and made public, the entire committee of the Romanian National
Party was brought to trial for "incitement against the Magyar nationality"
incurred in this very petition (7 May 1894) [...]


The trial took place before a Magyar chauvinistic jury at Koloszvar, and at
an early stage in the proceedings counsel for the defence - among whom, it is
significantly to note, three leading Slovak advocates of the day
(Milos Stefanovic, Matthew Dula, Stephen Fajnor) were serving as volunteers -
found it necessary to withdraw from the court owing to the attitude of its
president. Elaborate precautions were taken to supply the foreign press with a
garbled version of the trial and to prevent the true facts from leaking out:
and
on the second day the minister of the interior sent urgent instructions to all
country authorities to arrest any "agitators" whom they might find stirring up
the people [...]

In the name of all his colleagues the party chairman Dr Ioan Ratiu, read aloud
a fiery declaration, declining to recognise the jurisdiction of a court
"where the Magyars figure both as accuser and judge".

"What is under discussion here is the very existence of the Romanian
people, and the national existence of a people is not discussed,
but affirmed... There can be no question of judgement : you can condemn us
as individuals, but not as representatives of our people ... But even though
you are not competent to judge us, there is none the less another tribunal,
larger, more enlightened, and assuredly more impartial - the tribunal of the
civilised world, which will condemn you yet more severely than it has hitherto
done. By your spirit of medieval intolerance, by a racial fanaticism which has
not its equal in Europe, you will, if you condemn us, simply succeed in
proving to the world that the Magyars are a discordant note in the concert
of European nations"

[...]

Dr. Ratiu, on his return to Turda was greeted by a Magyar mob,
who attacked his house and broke up his furniture. Ratiu came out
of the balcony and called out "Thank you, gentlemen, that's how I always
pictured you!" [...]

[...] There was a deep gulf fixed between the Magyar ruling class and the
Romanian peasantry, whose landhunger was still unassuaged and which still
occupied (mutatis mutandis) the same position of political and social
helotry in which its ancestors had lived for generations. Virtually banished
from
towns, or at least relegated on sufferance to the suburbs, excluded from public
office and deliberately cramped in education and culture, they found a focus of
democratic resistance in church and school alone, and this the Apponyi Laws
were
steadily setting themselves to undermine [...] A fresh conflict with the crown
over
the army question led to Khuen's fall in April 1912, and his successor,
Dr.Ladislau Lukacs, in taking over the pledge of universal suffrage, defined it
"in such a way as to preserve the due influence of the more developed and riper
strata
of society and also the unitary national character of the Hungarian state"
[...] At
last on June 1913 Count Tisza again became premier and set himself at one and
the same
time to crush parliamentary obstruction, even by an armed guard; to check the
democratic onslaught by a carefully doctored Franchise Reform resting
on differentiation by age literacy and taxation; and finally to reach a
settlement with the nationalities, or at any rate the Romanians, whom alone he
regarded as a real danger. His genuine desire to reach an agreement was never
in doubt
but its prospect was vitiated by his feudal and arrogant outlook: to him the
Magyar must be "master in his own house", and the Romanian was a citizen of the
second rank, whose mere survival was a proof of the unexampled generosity
of the "Herrenvolk" (az uralkodo' nemzet).



 ------------------------------------------
 Reference:  "A history of the Roumanians,
 from Roman times to the completion of unity"
 by R. W. Seton-Watson. Cambridge [Eng.], The University press, 1934.
 viii, 596 p. XVI pl.(port.,incl.front.)fold.map. 25 cm.

fellow=ficko, buddy=pajty, for male. female : bicERROR bikfic= little,.River:
 Sajo, tisza, Note good english books are on the market on vizslas.



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