With the General and the Ban there is the Bishop, Joseph George
Strossmayer, one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century. But
before he became Bishop of Djakovo he saw the Government suppress
those aspirations which he laboured for throughout his life. The
Austrian Government had presented Gaj, in recognition of his literary
work, with a diamond ring; but when they saw that his Illyrian
programme persisted in aiming at the union of Croatia and Dalmatia,
then at last they vetoed his Illyrianism and the word Illyria. His
friends thereupon called themselves the "National party," which was in
the Croatian Diet more numerous than the "Magyarones," who--many of
them unprogressive landlords--stood for the most absolute union with
Hungary. The National party demanded that Rieka, which was still
"separatum sacrae regni Hungariae adnexum corpus," should be united with
the rest of Croatia; but the Magyars would naturally not let their one
small port be taken from them. Those among the Magyars who consented
to discuss the matter with the Croats said that if indeed they had
purloined one Croat port (for they confessed that 350 kilometres
separate Rieka from the nearest place in Hungary), yet the Croatians
could afford to treat them with generosity, since they possessed at
least two other ports, Bakar and Zengg, that were every bit as good.
It was quite true that till Rieka was connected by the railway to the
valleys of the Save, the Drave and the Danube, she had no advantage
over Zengg and Bakar. None of these are natural ports: at Rieka there
is no protecting island, Zengg and Bakar are available for small ships
only, and behind all three there is a barrier of mountains. All of
them, moreover, suffer from the visitations of the bora, which blows
from the north sometimes for weeks on end. Having pointed out their
own necessities and all these limitations, the Magyars stayed at
Rieka. But they cast about them for some means by which the
inconvenient Croats could be countered, and of course the simplest
plan was to protect, as Austria was doing in Dalmatia, that small
party of the Slavs on whom the presence of a few Italians at Rieka and
their knowledge of this language and perhaps their education at some
school in Italy had made such a profound impression that they wished
no longer to be looked upon as Slavs--and some of them quite honestly
thought that they were not Slavs. Of such was the Autonomist party,
whose sole purpose was to flourish at Rieka in alliance with
Hungarians and to keep Rieka a free Hungarian town. Perhaps the
Magyars had no choice of methods, but it does not look magnanimous to
plant yourself in some one else's house and then proceed to make
conspiracies with a disgruntled child. They succoured the Autonomists
in every way. For instance, the Croats had, as elsewhere on the coast,
been so unjustly kept from having schools. The two or three schools in
existence were for those who turned their back on national ambitions
and cultivated modern Italian, even as the nobles up at Zagreb had
cultivated Latin. Now in 1838 the Croats of Rieka, who--it is needless
to say--were much the more numerous part of the population, thought
that Gaj's wonderful educational movement, which was spreading far and
wide, should not find Rieka unresponsive. So they asked that the
Croatian language should be taught, as well as the Italian, in the
local schools. "This was the first attempt," says Mr. Edoardo
Susmel,[41] who is, I gather, a schoolmaster or an ex-schoolmaster at
Rieka. "But the people of Rieka," he says, "always with admirable
tenacity resisted the brute force with which the Croats wanted to
impose on the Italian city the rights of him who is strongest. The
city arose as one man against this first attack and the schools
remained Italian."
The conflict in the Croatian Diet between the National party and that
of the Magyarones grew in violence. The latter, egged on from
Buda-Pest, demanded in the most peremptory fashion that the Croat
deputies should henceforward speak in Magyar instead of Latin. It was
in the same year, 1843, that one of the deputies, Ivan Kukulejevi['c],
made the first speech in Croatian. Szemere, a Magyar, cried out
furiously that Croatia was a land which had been conquered by force of
arms, and the Hungarian Parliament went so far as to pass a law which
made the teaching of Magyar obligatory in Croatian schools and for the
Croatian delegates in the Hungarian Diet. The Croats replied by
petitioning the Emperor to separate their country completely from
Hungary. Ferdinand V. wavered between the two sides; in 1843 he
annulled the decisions of the Hungarian Parliament, and in 1844 he
laid it down that in six years the Croats would have to adopt Magyar
as their official language. It seemed as if the questions between
Magyar and Croat could be settled by no other method than by war.