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