Note (Back) — Chapter XXVI

546. The Magyar Domination.—The explanation of this state of affairs is to be sought in the ethnographical composition of Hungary's population. Like Austria, Hungary contains a mélange of races and nationalities. The original Hungarians are the Magyars, and by the Magyar element attempt has been made always to preserve as against the affiliated German and Slavic peoples an absolute superiority of social, economic, and political power. The Magyars occupy almost exclusively the more desirable portion of the country, i.e., the great central plain intersected by the Danube and the Theiss, where they preponderate decidedly in as many as nineteen counties. Clustered around them, and in more or less immediate touch with kindred peoples beyond the borders, are the Germans and the Slavs—the Slovaks in the mountains of the north, the Ruthenes on the slopes of the Carpathians, the Serbs on the southeast, and the Croats on the southwest. When the census of 1900 was taken the total population of Hungary (including Croatia-Slavonia) was 19,254,559. Of this number 8,742,301 were Magyars; 8,029,316 were Slavs; 2,135,181 were Germans; and 397,761 were of various minor racial groups. To put it differently, the Magyars numbered 8,742,301; the non-Magyars, 10,512,258. The fundamental fault of the Hungarian electorate is that it has been shaped, and is deliberately maintained, in the interest of a race which comprises numerically but 45.4 per cent of the country's population.[697] So skillfully, indeed, have electoral qualifications and electoral proceedings been devised in the Magyar interest that the non-Magyar majority has but meager representation, and still less influence, at Budapest.[698] Even in Hungary proper the electorate in 1906 comprised but 24.4 per cent of the male population over twenty years of age; and, despite the disqualifications that have been mentioned one-fourth of the men who vote are officials or employees of the state.