Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/183

Rh when Vienna rose with the strength of a young giant, and Milan drove out the armed host of its oppressor, Deak became minister of justice in the cabinet of Count Bathyany. In the stormy movements which now swept over the face of Europe, he did not appear to great advantage. The moderantism to which his whole nature inclined unﬁtted him for the rough task of coping with a tyranny that had only been cowed, but not crushed. Generally a cautious but observant man, he seemed in those days to lack even the foresight which looks far ahead into an enemy's probable tactics. Reforms in the domain of justice he ﬁrmly advocated and carried out. Trial by jury, the freedom of the press, and similar questions of deep home import, had his fullest attention. But in matters affecting the political situation at large he did not come up to the height of a great historical moment.

Whilst the strongest real guarantees were required to uphold the newly-born freedom against a possible and only too probable treachery, he was content with a mere royal rescript. At the risk of his whole popularity, he urged his own trustful view against the party which then began to gather round Kossuth. To the proposition that Prince Metternich's name should be erased from the roll of Hungarian magnates Deak offered a strenuous opposition. This was a fault, even from the point of view of moderate constitutionalism — which at any rate had to break with the despotic past.

Very rightly he recommended that friendly relations should be entered into with the National Constituent Assembly of Germany by means of a semi-diplomatic mission to Frankfort-on-the-Main. Hungary's separate political existence was thus clearly marked off. In Italian affairs, he failed to understand the drift of the time. Going by the stipulations of the old Pragmatic Sanction, he, a liberal, gave his support to the demand of the court of Vienna that Hungary should furnish troops to help in the overthrow of the Italian cause. In this, it is true, he only did that which even Kossuth had temporarily sanctioned. Written law, which Deak had so often used in support of his own country's rights, was thus made to serve as a chain wherewith to bind another nation rightfully struggling for independence. Yet, could there be a doubt even for a moment that, if the house of Habsburg were victorious against the Italian "rebels," it would speedily lead its troops, fresh from victory, against the Hungarian insurgents?

"I love progress, but not revolution!" Deak was wont to say. But in the midst of a revolution, there was no choice for any one standing in the front but to be hammer or anvil. The situation was given, no individual likings were of any avail. Events had to be resolutely used for the furtherance of freedom—or else the ﬂoodgates of absolutism would be forced open, and every liberty that had been gained be swamped by an ugly rush of reaction. For a moment, the prospects of Hungary had seemed bright in the early part of 1848. Equality of rights was decreed for its manifold races, some of which had, before that time, held the unenviable position of a mere "misera plebs contribuens, optima flens, pessima ridens." Such, indeed, had once been the cruel saying which declared the wretched hind to be at his best when, bathed in tears, he paid his scot; and at his worst, when he felt in a mood for laughter.

Unfortunately, the ﬁerce passions of race-hatred, kindled by dynastic guile, soon ran riot at the expense of that liberty which had been decreed for all, and which all might have equally enjoyed. A discordance of tribes marks the whole east of Europe. Not only in Turkey, but in Hungary, and even in Poland, odd fragments of races are heterogeneously huddled together, as stray remnants and sediments of the migration drifts. In Austrian Galicia, where the Polish race, properly so called, is broken in by a Ruthenian population which holds an intermediate position between the Poles, or Lechs, and the Russians, Prince Metternich, in 1846, was able to make use of this tribal antagonism, as well as of the class feuds between the peasants and the nobles, in order to quell a patriotic Polish movement by a cruel massacre.

In Hungary, after the enthusiastic rising of 1848, the smouldering embers of race-hatred were soon fanned by the Mephistophelic agency of an imperalist camarilla. Hungary is a polyglot country. Within its precincts there are Magyars and Sclaves, Germans and Roumans; nationalities differing from one another in origin and speech as much as the Turks do from the Muscovites, or the English from the Italians. Besides these chief races, there is a medley of Arnauts; Bulgars, Armenians, Gipsy clans, and so forth, which go to eke out the many-coloured State ediﬁce between the Carpathian range and the Danube. In this confusion of tribes and tongues, the Magyars hold the central and most compact