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98 hope. They organised the population into a true nation. By their wisdom they created a future for their country, and by their poetry they surrounded it with glory. One sign of the country's awakening was the rapid development of the capital, Pest, which had not yet been amalgamated with Buda to form the present capital, Budapest. At the commencement of the nineteenth century Pest had no more than twenty thousand inhabitants, white at its close the population numbered more than half a million.

The greatest transformations took place in the realms of politics, literature and social economy. The chief political reforms are linked with the name of Kossuth. For many centuries, Hungary had not been a democratic state, for the nobles and landed proprietors possessed many important privileges which were denied to the rest of the population. The people were divided into different social layers, each endowed with its special rights or burdened with its special duties. All this came to an end through the activity of Kossuth. The various classes were fused together into one great community: the nation, with equal rights and equal duties (1848).

In one of the lectures which Kossuth delivered in England he gave an account of this great national trans­formation. "Excepting the burgesses of the privileged towns, the nobility and the gentry were the only classes that fully enjoyed the political and social rights con­ferred by the constitution. But those privileges were not reserved only for the eldest son as in England. In Hungary, every member of a nobleman's family in­herited all the rights and titles of his parents. Accordingly the privileged class had grown exceedingly, and numbered from five to six hundred thousand persons,