Note (Back) — Chapter XXIV

"If," says a modern writer, "France has been a laboratory for political experiments, Austria-Hungary is a museum of political curiosities, but it contains nothing so extraordinary as the relation between Austria and Hungary themselves."[644] In its present form this relation rests upon the memorable Ausgleich, or Compromise, of 1867. The historical phases of it, however, may be traced to a period as remote as the first half of the sixteenth century, when, in 1526, after the Hungarians had suffered overwhelming defeat by the Turks at the Battle of Mohács, a Hapsburg prince, the later Emperor Ferdinand I., assumed, upon election by the Hungarian diet, the throne of the demoralized eastern kingdom.[645] Until the eighteenth century the union of the two monarchies was always precarious, much of the time practically non-existent. Set in the midst of a whirlpool of races and political powers, the ancient Hungarian state, recovered from its days of disaster, struggled unremittingly to preserve its identity, and even to regain its independence, as against the overshadowing Imperial authority of which Austria was the seat. The effort was fairly successful and as late as the Napoleonic period Hungary, while bound to her western neighbor by a personal union through the crown, maintained not only her essential autonomy but even the constitutional style of government which had been hers since at least the early portion of the thirteenth century. A rapid sketch of the earlier political development of the two states seems a necessary introduction to an examination of the institutions, joint and separate, which to-day enter into the texture of their governmental organization.