exist_ as a Nation, no more as a State. It was and is put under
martial law. Strangers, aliens to our laws and history as well as to our
tongue, rule now, where our fathers lived and our brothers bled. To be a
Hungarian is become almost a crime in our own native land. Well: to
justify before the world the extinction of Hungary, the partition of its
territory, and the reincorporating of the dissected limbs into the
common body of servitude, the treacherous dynasty was anxious to show
that the Hungarians are in a minority in their own land. They hoped that
intimidation and terrorism would induce even the very Magyars to disavow
their language and birth. They ordered a census of races to be made.
They performed it with the iron rule of martial law; and dealt so
arbitrarily that thousands of women and men, who professed to be
Magyars, who professed not to know any other language than the Magyar,
were, notwithstanding all their protestation, put down as Sclaves,
Serbs, Germans, or Wallachians, because their names had not quite a
Hungarian sound. And still what was the issue of this malignant plot?
That of the twelve millions of inhabitants of Hungary proper, the
Magyars turned out to be more than eight millions, some two millions
more than we know the case really is. The people instinctively felt that
the tyrant had the design through the pretext of language to destroy the
existence of the complex nation, and it met the tyrannic plot as if it
answered, "We are, and must be, a nation; and if the tyrant takes
language only for the mark of nationality, then we are all Magyars." And
mark well, gentlemen! this happened, not under my governorship, but
under the rule of Austrian martial law. The Cabinet of Vienna became
furious; it thought of a new census, but prudent men told them that a
new census would give the whole twelve millions as Magyars; thus no new
census was taken.

But on the European continent there unhappily has grown up a school,