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 Széchenyi, 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 that pass, we don't
want to look back, we want to look forward. We have still to build up
the structure that with you is finished; we are deficient in everything
that a state wants in these days, and in our haste to make railways,
roads, and bridges, to erect public buildings, and to promote industrial
enterprises, we make certain financial blunders. You must not forget
that we in Hungary are much in the same state that you were in England
in the thirteenth century, before tenant-holdings had become general. We
shall gradually learn to see the advantages to be derived from letting
land on your farm system. There is nothing we desire so much as the
creation of the tenant-farmer class, which hardly exists yet. Large
estates would be far better divided and let as farms on your system. We
are in a transition state as regards many things in agricultural
matters. English or Scotch farmers would be welcomed over here by the
great landowners. Your countryman, Professor Wrightson, convinced
himself of this when he was here in 1873. If they could command some
capital, the produce of the land in many instances could be doubled."
I asked my friend about labourers' wages, but he said it was difficult
to give any fixed rate. A mere agricultural day-labourer would get from
1s. 3d. to 1s. 6d.; sometimes the evil practice of paying wages in kind
obtained--viz., a man receives so much Indian corn (_kukoricz_). And not
unfrequently a peasant undertakes to plough the fields twice, to hoe
them three times, and to see the crop housed, for which he receives the
half of the yield provided he has furnished the seed. The peasants' own
lands, as a rule, are very badly managed; their ploughing is shallow,
and they do nothing or next to nothing in the way of drainage.