Variety of races in Hungary--Wallacks or
Roumains--Statistics--Savage outbreak of the Wallacks in former
years--Panslavic ideas--Roumanians and their origin--Priests of the
Greek Church--Destruction of forests--Spirit of
Communism--Incendiary fires.
The mixture of races in Hungary is a puzzle to any outsider. There is
the original substratum of Slavs, overlaid by Szeklers, Magyars, German
immigrants, Wallacks, Rusniacks, Jews, and gipsies. An old German writer
has quaintly described the characteristics of these various peoples in
the following manner:--
"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.
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.
The Roumain is a Communist pure and simple; the uneducated among them
know no other political creed. It is not that of the advanced school of
Communism, which deals with social theories, but a simple consistent
belief that, as they themselves express it, "what God makes grow belongs
to one and all alike." In this spirit he helps himself to the fruit in
his neighbour's garden when too lazy to cultivate the ground for
himself.
This child of nature is by instinct a nomadic shepherd and herdsman; he
hates forests, and will ruthlessly burn down the finest trees to make a
clearing for sheep-pastures. It is impossible to travel twenty miles in
the Southern Carpathians without encountering the terrible ravages
committed by these people in the beautiful woods that adorn the sides of
the mountains.
"The Wallacks find it too much trouble to fell the trees," says Mr
Boner. "They destroy systematically: one year the bark is stripped off,
the wood dries, and the year after it is fired.... In 1862, near
Toplitza, 23,000 _joch_ of forest were burned by the peasantry."
Judging from what I saw during my travels in Hungary in 1875-76, I
should say the evil described by Mr Boner ten years before has in no way
abated. The Wallacks pursue their ruthless destruction of the forests,
and the law seems powerless to arrest the mischief. At present there is
wood and enough, but the time will come when the country at large must
suffer from this reckless waste. There are about twenty-three million
acres of forest in Hungary, including almost the only oak-woods left in
Europe. The great proportion of the forest-land belongs to the State,
hence the supervision is less keen, and the depredations more readily
winked at. Riding one day with a Hungarian friend, I asked what would be
the probable cost of a wooden house then building on the verge of the
forest. My friend replied, laughing, "That depends on whether the
builder stole the wood himself, or only bought it of some one else who
had stolen it; he might possibly have purchased the wood from the real
owner, but that is not very probable. So you see I really cannot tell
you what the house will cost."
Incendiary fires are very common in Hungary. Here, again, the Wallacks
do their share of mischief. If they have a grudge against an active
magistrate or a thriving neighbour, his farmstead is set on fire, not
once, but many times probably. Added to this, the Wallack takes an
actual pleasure in wanton destruction. As an instance, an English
company who are working coal mines in the neighbourhood of Orsova have
been obliged within the last two years to relay their railway from the
mines to the Danube no less than three times, in consequence of the
Wallacks persistently destroying the permanent way and stealing the
rails.
Notwithstanding all this the Wallacks are not without their good points.
They become capital workmen under certain circumstances, and they
possess an amount of natural intelligence which promises better things
as the result of education. "Barring his weakness for tobacco and
spirits, the much-abused Wallack is a useful fellow to the sportsman and
the traveller," said a sporting friend of mine who visits Transylvania
nearly every autumn.
[Footnote 6: Hungary and Transylvania, 1839.]
[Footnote 7: 'Geographical Aspect of the Eastern Question,' Fortnightly
Review, January 1877.]
[Footnote 8: Transylvania: its Products and People.]