The War and Democracy Part 8

On the day when it appears to have been solved Europe will inevitably be confronted by the Austrian Question."--ALBERT SOREL (1902).

In April 1909, a week after the international crisis evoked by Austria's annexation of Bosnia had come to an end, I paid my first visit to Cetinje, the tiny mountain-capital of Montenegro, and was a.s.sured by the Premier, Dr. Tomanovi, that the conflict had merely been postponed, not averted--a fact which even then was obvious enough. "But remember," he said, "it is a question of _Aut aut_ (either, or)--either Serbia and Montenegro or Austria-Hungary. One or other has got to go, and you may rest a.s.sured that in four, or at most five, years from now there will be a European war over this very question." At the time I merely regarded his prophecy as a proof of Serb megalomania, but it has been literally fulfilled.

In 1908-1909 Austria-Hungary, with the aid of her German ally, enforced her wishes in respect of Bosnia upon a reluctant Europe; but instead of following up this success by a determined effort to solve the Southern Slav question on an Austrian basis, she allowed the confusion to grow yearly worse confounded, and gradually created an intolerable situation from which a peaceful exit was well-nigh impossible. The actual event which precipitated the struggle, the event from which the diplomatic contest of last July, and thus the great war, first proceeded, was the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo on June 28 and the consequent acute friction between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. But the murder, as will be shown later, was merely made the pretext for Austria's declaration of war. The real causes lie far deeper, and can only be properly understood on the basis of an historical survey.

My apology for inflicting so many unfamiliar details upon the reader is that the key to the whole situation lies in Austria-Hungary, and that upon the fate of its provinces and races in this war depends to a very great extent the question whether the new Europe which is to issue from this fiery ordeal is to be better than the old Europe which is crumbling in ruins before our eyes. For the moment a thick fog of war obscures this point of view; but the time will a.s.suredly come when it will emerge in its true perspective.

In recent years it had become a cheap journalistic commonplace to refer to the coming "inevitable" struggle between Teuton and Slav, and the present war is no doubt widely regarded as proving the correctness of this theory, despite the fact that the two chief groups of Teutons are ranged on opposite sides, and that the Slavs enjoy the active support of Celts and Latins also. That such a struggle has come, is in the last resort due to the false conceptions of Nationality which underly the policy of the two central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. The freedom from foreign oppression which the Germans so n.o.bly vindicated against Napoleon has not been extended to their own subject races, the Poles, Danes, and Lorrainers; and recent years have seen the accentuation of a conflict the germs of which may be detected as far back as the fatal crime of the Polish Part.i.tion in the eighteenth century. The policy of Germanisation in Austria has been gradually undermined by causes which it would take too long to enumerate, but its sting has survived in the maintenance of a foreign policy which treats 26,000,000 Slavs as a mere _annexe_ of militant Germanism and as "gun-fodder" for the designs of Berlin; while in Hungary the parallel policy of Magyarisation has increased in violence from year to year, poisoning the wells of public opinion, creating a gulf of hatred between the Magyars and their subject races (the Slovaks, Roumanians, Croats, Serbs, etc.), and rendering cordial relations with the neighbouring Balkan States impossible. Nor is it a mere accident that official Germany and official Hungary should have pursued an actively Turcophil policy; for the same tendencies have been noticeable in Turkey, though naturally in a somewhat cruder form than farther west. Just as the Young Turk policy of Turkification rendered a war between Turkey and the Balkan States inevitable, so the policy of Magyarisation pursued by two generations of Hungarian statesmen sowed the seeds of war between Austria and the Southern Slavs. In the former case it was possible to isolate the conflict, in the latter it has involved the greater part of Europe in a common disaster.

The struggle centres round the Austro-Serbian dispute. Let us then attempt a brief survey of the two countries.

--1. _Austria and the Habsburgs_.--Let us begin with Austria-Hungary. In this country many misconceptions prevail regarding Austria-Hungary; nor is this surprising, for it is unique among States, and whether we regard it from a political, a const.i.tutional, a racial, or a social point of view, the issues are equally complicated and difficult to sum up. With the aid of a good gazetteer it is easy enough to elicit the facts that the Austria-Hungary of to-day is a state of fifty-two million inhabitants, divided into three component parts: _(a)_ the Empire of Austria, _(b)_ the Kingdom of Hungary, each with subdivisions which will be referred to later, and _(c)_ the annexed provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina, jointly administered by the two Governments. But this bald fact is meaningless except in connection with the historical genesis of the Habsburg State.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AUSTRIA-HUNGARY; PHYSICAL]

Austria--_Oesterreich_--is the ancient Eastmark or frontier province, the outpost of Carlovingian power against the tribes of the east, then of the mediaeval German Empire against Slav and Magyar. Under the House of Habsburg, which first rose to greatness on the ruins of a Greater Bohemia, Austria grew steadily stronger as a distinct unit. Two famous mottoes sum up the policy of that dynasty in the earlier centuries of its existence.

_Austriae est Imperare Orbi Universo_ (Austria's it is to Rule the Universe) ran the device of that canny Frederick III., who, amid much adversity, laid the plans which prompted an equally striking epigram about his son and successor Maximilian, the "Last of the Knights"--_Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube_ (Let others wage war; do thou marry, O fortunate Austria!). There were three great stages in Habsburg marriage policy. In 1479 Maximilian married the heiress of Charles the Bold, thus acquiring the priceless dowry of the Low Countries (what are now Belgium and Holland). In 1506 his son Philip added the crown of Spain and the Indies by his marriage with the heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1526, when the battle of Mohacs placed Hungary at the mercy of the Turks, Maximilian's grandson Ferdinand, in his wife's name, united Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia with the Austrian duchies.

Henceforth for over two centuries Austria and Habsburg became the bulwark of Christendom against the Turks; though delayed by wars of religion and by the excesses of religious bigotry, they yet never lost sight of the final goal. Twice--at the beginning and at the end of this period, in 1527 and 1683--the Turks were before the very walls of Vienna, but the second of these occasions represents their final effort. In the closing years of the seventeenth and the first two decades of the eighteenth centuries the tide finally rolled back against them. Foremost among the victors stands out the great name of Prince Eugene, comrade-in-arms of our own Marlborough, whose song, "Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter" (Prince Eugene, the n.o.ble Knight), has been sung in July and August 1914 on the streets of Vienna, just as "Marlbrook s'en va-t-en guerre" might be sung by our Belgian allies. The peace of 1718 represents Habsburg's farthest advance southwards; Belgrade and half of present-day Serbia owned allegiance to Vienna. Then came the check of 1739, when these conquests were restored to the Sultan. Due merely to incompetent generals, it need not have been permanent, had not Frederick the Great created a diversion from the north. By the time that the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War were over, that expansion southwards which had seemed so certain was irrevocably postponed. The organisation of fresh "Military Frontiers," the colonisation of waste lands in South Hungary--all was admirable so far as it went, but was already a defensive rather than an offensive measure. Meanwhile a formidable rival appeared in the shape of the Russian colossus, and the history of two centuries is dominated by Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans. Here we are confronted by the first of those lost opportunities in which the history of modern Austria is unhappily so rich.

During the eighteenth century Austria became, as it were, the chief home of bureaucratic government, first under Maria Theresa, one of the greatest women-sovereigns, then under her son Joseph II. A series of "enlightened experiments" in government, typical of the age of Voltaire and of Frederick, and honestly conducted _for_ the people, though never _by_ the people, ended as such experiments are apt to end, in failure. The most that can be said is that the bureaucratic machine had become more firmly fixed in the groove which it was henceforth to occupy.

The failure of Joseph II. was above all due to his inability to recognise the meaning of Nationality, to his attempt to apply Germanisation as the one infallible remedy for all internal difficulties in his dominions. The idea of Nationality, already gaining strength, obtained a fresh impetus from the French Revolution. While in the west it sowed the seeds of United Italy and United Germany, which the nineteenth century was to bring to fruition, in the Balkans it stirred waters which had seemed dead for centuries, and led to the uprising of the Serbs and Greeks, then of the Roumanians, and finally a generation later of the Bulgarians. In the Habsburg dominions the same movement revealed itself in the revival of national feeling in Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia, but nowhere more strongly than in Hungary, where it was accompanied by a remarkable literary revival and the appearance of a group of Magyar poets of real genius.

The Kingdom of Hungary, which from 1526 to 1687 had been partially under Turkish rule, led a vegetable existence during the eighteenth century. This lull was a necessary period of recuperation after exhausting wars.

The ancient Hungarian const.i.tution, dating in its essentials from the thirteenth century, but fallen on evil days during the Turkish era, now came more and more out of abeyance. Its fundamental principles were reaffirmed by the famous laws of Leopold II. (1790-92), and after a further relapse due to the Napoleonic wars, a long series of const.i.tutional and linguistic reforms were introduced by successive parliaments between 1825 and 1848.

Without entering into a discussion of the Hungarian const.i.tution, it is well to point out one factor which lies at the root of all political and const.i.tutional development in Hungary and explains the Magyar outlook for centuries past, even up to the present day. Till 1840 Latin was the official language of the country, and in that Latin the term for the political nation was _Populus_, which we would naturally translate as people. But populus contrasted in Hungarian law with plebs, the _misera plebs contribuens,_ that phrase of ominous meaning to describe the ma.s.s of the oppressed and unenfranchised people, the populus being the n.o.bles, a caste which was relatively very wide, but none the less a caste, and which enjoyed a monopoly of all political power. Till 1848 only the populus could vote, only the plebs could pay taxes--a delightful application of the principle, "Heads I win, tails you lose!" In 1848 the distinction was broken down in theory, the franchise being extended beyond the privileged cla.s.s by the initiative of that cla.s.s itself. But in effect the distinction has survived to the present day in a veiled form. Political power, and, above all, the parliamentary franchise and the county elective bodies, continued to be a monopoly--henceforth a monopoly of the Magyar n.o.bility, _plus_ those cla.s.ses whom they had a.s.similated and attached to their cause, _against_ the other races, forming more than half the population of Hungary. This point of populus and plebs may seem at first sight somewhat pedantic and technical; but in reality it is the key which explains the whole social structure of Hungary, even its economic and agrarian problems.

The period from the death of Joseph II. to the great revolutionary movement of 1848 may be regarded, so far as eastern Europe is concerned, as a period when nationality is simmering everywhere. It is a period of preparation for the rise of national States--ushered in by the great crime of the Polish Part.i.tion, to which so many modern evils may be traced, and closed by a sudden explosion which shook Europe from Paris to Budapest, from Palermo to Berlin. The first stage was of course the long Napoleonic war, during which the seed was sown broadcast; the second, the era of reaction and political exhaustion (1815-1848), when all that was best in Europe concentrated in the Romantic movement in literature, art, and music.

For Austria this period was bound up with the name of Metternich, who personified the old hide-bound methods of the bureaucracy, the diplomacy of a past age, to which the nations were mere p.a.w.ns on a chessboard. Under him the "Police-State" a.s.sumed its most perfect form, a form not even surpa.s.sed by Russia from 1881 to 1905.

Then came the year 1848, when the dams burst. The Hungarian const.i.tution, restored in its entirety, became for a time the watchword and inspirer of the movement, while Austria for the first time received a serious const.i.tution. Unhappily the issue between Reaction and Progress was not a clear one. The Magyars in Hungary unquestionably stood for historic development and const.i.tutional rights, but they also stood for racial hegemony, for the forcible a.s.similation of all the other races, for a unitary Magyar State instead of the old polyglot Hungary. They thus drove all the other races to coalesce with the dynasty and the forces of reaction. The result was a violent racial war, with all kinds of excesses.

Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Saxons, all fought against the Magyars, and finally the scale was turned by the Russian troops who poured across the Carpathians in the name of outraged autocracy.

There followed the inevitable reaction, which again can be best summed up in two phrases--that of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, "Austria will astonish the world by her ingrat.i.tude," so strikingly fulfilled in the Crimean War, when Austria left Russia in the lurch; and that of a Hungarian patriot, "The other races have received as reward what we Magyars receive as punishment." In short, the statesmen of Vienna, untaught by experience, reverted to the old bureaucratic and absolutist _regime_.

For ten years (1849-1859) this endured--Clericalism rampant, financial ruin, stagnation everywhere. Then Nationality burst its bonds once more.

The war with Napoleon III. ended in Austria's loss of Lombardy and the creation of the Italian kingdom. Faced by the bankruptcy of the whole political and financial system, Francis Joseph launched into a period of const.i.tutional experiment. Following the line of least resistance, as throughout his long reign, he inclined now to federalism, now to centralism, and he was still experimenting when the war of 1866 broke out.

For Austria this war was decisive, for its results were her final expulsion both from Germany and from Italy, and the creation of that fatal Dual System which has distorted her whole subsequent development.

Under the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 the Dual Monarchy is composed of two equal and separate States, the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, each possessing a distinct parliament and cabinet of its own, but both sharing between them the three Joint Ministries of Foreign Affairs, War, and Finance. The chiefs of these three offices are equally responsible to both Delegations, which are committees of the two Parliaments, sitting alternately in Vienna and Budapest, but acting quite independently of each other.

This system really secured the political power in Austria and Hungary to two races--the Germans and the Magyars, and they, as the strongest in each country, bought off the two next strongest, the Poles and the Croats, by the grant of autonomy to Galicia and Croatia. The remaining eight were not considered at all. At first this ingenious device seemed to offer fair prospects of success. But ere long--for reasons which would lead us too far--the German hegemony broke down in Austria, and the whole balance was disturbed. It gradually became clear that the system was only workable when one scale was high in the air. The history of the past forty-seven years is the history of the gradual decay of the Dual System. Austria has progressed in many ways; her inst.i.tutions have steadily grown freer, her political sense has developed, universal suffrage has been introduced, racial inequalities have been reduced though not abolished, industry, art, and general culture have advanced steadily. But she has been continually hampered by Hungary, where racial monopoly has grown worse and worse. The Magyar Chauvinists attempted the impossible--the a.s.similation by seven million people of twelve million others. Yet in spite of every imaginable trick--a corrupt and oppressive administration, gross manipulation of the franchise, press persecution, the suppression of schools and ruthless restriction of every form of culture--the non-Magyar races are stronger to-day than in 1867. And the result of the struggle has been in Hungary a decay of political standards, a corruption of public life, such as fills even the greatest optimists with despair.

--2. _Hungary and Magyar Misrule_.--Such an a.s.sertion may seem to run counter to the common idea of Hungary as the home of liberty and the vanguard of popular uprisings against despotism, and it is certainly incompatible with the arrogant claim of Magyar Statesmen that "nowhere in the world is there so much freedom as in Hungary." At the risk of disturbing the proportion of this chapter, I propose to give a few cla.s.sic ill.u.s.trations of Magyar methods, selected almost at random from an overwhelming ma.s.s of d.a.m.ning evidence.

On paper Hungary possesses a most admirable and enlightened law guaranteeing "the Equal Rights of Nationalities" (1868); in practice, it has remained almost from the very first a dead letter. Let us take the field of education. Every effort, legal and illegal, has been made to Magyarise the educational system, with the result that in all the primary and secondary schools under State control Magyar is the exclusive language of instruction, while the number of denominational schools has been steadily diminished and their sphere of action, as more favourable to the non-Magyar races, materially restricted. Fifty years ago the Slovaks, who even then numbered over two millions, possessed three gymnasia (middle schools) which they had founded and maintained by their own exertions.

In 1875 all three were arbitrarily closed by orders of the Hungarian Government, and since that date the unhappy Slovaks have not been allowed a single secondary school in which their own language is taught, while the number of their primary schools has been reduced from 1821 in 1869 to 440 in 1911. The deliberate aim is, of course, to prevent the growth of a Slovak middle cla.s.s. It is quite a common thing for schoolboys to be persecuted or even dismissed for showing Slovak proclivities or even talking their mother--tongue "ostentatiously" on the street. Only last year a brilliant young Slovak student, known to me personally, was deprived by the Magyar authorities of a scholars.h.i.+p in Oriental languages, for no other reason than that he was "untrustworthy in a national sense"![1]

Such instances are even more frequent among the Roumanians of Hungary.

A specially notorious case occurred in March 1912 at Grosswardein, when sixteen Roumanian theological students were expelled from the Catholic seminary for the "demonstrative use" of their language, which was regarded as offensive by their fellow-students and professors!

[Footnote 1: This doc.u.ment is in my possession.]

Linguistic restrictions are carried to outrageous lengths. There is not a single inscription in any language save Magyar in any post office or railway station throughout Hungary. Slovak medals and stamps, produced in America and bearing such treasonable inscriptions as "For our Slovak language" and "I am proud to be a Slovak," have been confiscated in Hungary. Only Magyar inscriptions are tolerated on the tombstones of the Budapest cemeteries. The erection of monuments to Roumanian or Slovak patriots has more than once been prohibited, and the funds collected have been arbitrarily seized and applied to Magyar purposes. National colours, other than the Magyar, are strictly forbidden. Two years ago, at the funeral of a Roumanian poet at Kronstadt (Transylvania) gendarmes pressed up to the hea.r.s.e and clipped off the colours from a wreath which had been sent by the Society of Journalists in Bucarest. About the same time a nurse was sent to prison because a child of three was found wearing a Roumanian tricolor bow, and its parents were reprimanded and fined. Last July on the very eve of war, fifteen theological students, returning to Bucarest from an excursion into Transylvania, were arrested at the frontier by Hungarian gendarmes, hauled by main force out of the train, sent back to Hermannstadt and kept for days in gaol; their offence consisted in waving some Roumanian tricolors from the train windows as they steamed out of the last station in Hungary!

No law of a.s.sociation exists in Hungary, and the government uses its arbitrary powers to prohibit or suppress even such harmless organisations as temperance societies, choral unions, or women's leagues. Perhaps the most notorious examples are the dissolution of the Slovak Academy in 1875 and of the Roumanian National Party's organisation in 1894; but the treatment meted out to trades unions and working-cla.s.s organisations, both Magyar and non-Magyar, for years past, has been equally scandalous. The right of a.s.sembly is no less precarious in a country where parliamentary candidates are arrested or expelled from their const.i.tuencies, where deputies are prevented from addressing their const.i.tuents, where an electoral address is often treated as a penal offence.

As for Hungary's electoral system, the less said the better.

Gerrymandering, a narrow and complicated franchise, bribery and corruption on a gigantic scale, the wholesale use of troops and gendarmes to prevent opposition voters from reaching the polls, the cooking of electoral rolls, illegal disqualifications, sham counts, official terrorism, and in many cases actual bloodshed--such are but a few of the methods which preserve a political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities. Small wonder, then, if the non-Magyar races of Hungary, who on a basis of population would have had 198 deputies, never were allowed to elect more than 25, and if even this scanty number was at the infamous elections of 1910 reduced by terrorism and corruption to eight!

In judicial matters the situation is no less galling. Pet.i.tions are not accepted in the courts, unless drawn up in Magyar, and the whole proceedings are invariably conducted in the same language. The non-Magyar "stands like an ox" before the courts of his native land, and a whole series of provisions exists for his repression, notably the monstrous paragraphs dealing with "action hostile to the State," with the "incitement of one nationality against another" and with the "glorification of a criminal action"--applied with rigorous severity to all political opponents of Magyarisation but never to its advocates. Let me cite one cla.s.sic example of the latter. In 1898 a well-known Slovak editor was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment for two articles severely criticising the Magyarisation of place-names in Hungary. On his return from prison he was met at the railway station of the little county town by a crowd of admirers: songs were sung, a short speech of welcome was delivered and a bouquet of flowers was presented. The sequel of this perfectly orderly incident was that no fewer than twenty-four persons, including Mr. Hurban the leading Slovak poet, were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying from fourteen days to six months. The three girls who had presented the flowers were let off with a fine of 16.

Perhaps the reader will regard me as a very dangerous conspirator, when I tell him that in June 1910 an old lady of seventy-three, the widow of a high-school headmaster, was fined 4 because I had called at her house for twenty minutes on election day without its being notified to the police, and that in June 1914 an enquiry was inst.i.tuted by the local authorities against some Slovak friends who had entertained me to luncheon! And yet I can honestly a.s.sert that I have never been guilty of any worse crime than Captain Grose, of whom Burns warned my countrymen a hundred years ago in the famous line:

A chiel's amang ye takin' notes!

The fabric of Magyar rule is far too rotten and corrupt to regard with equanimity any extensive note-taking on the part of the outer world.

Whole books might be written to ill.u.s.trate the contention that in matters of education, administration, and justice, of a.s.sociation and a.s.sembly, of the franchise and the press, the non-Magyar nationalities of Hungary have long been the victims of a policy of repression which is without any parallel in civilised Europe. It is this Magyar system, from which I have lifted but a corner of the veil, that is one of the mainsprings of the present war, and if there is to be a new and healthy Europe in the future, this system must be swept away root, branch and stock. To such lengths has national fanaticism driven the Magyars that in 1906 it was possible for an ex-Premier of Hungary, speaking in open Parliament amid the applause of the majority, to lay down the following axiom: "The legal State is the aim: but with this question we can only concern ourselves when we have already a.s.sured the national State.... Hungary's interests demand its erection on the most extreme Chauvinist lines." Men who applaud such a sentiment are worthy allies of those so-called statesmen who regard international treaties as "a mere sc.r.a.p of paper."

--3. _The Decay of the Dual System_.--The radical divergence of political development in Austria and in Hungary, its paralysing effect upon the foreign policy of the Monarchy as a whole, coupled with the growth of national feeling among the minor nationalities and their steady emanc.i.p.ation from the economic thraldom of the German and the Jew--all this has slowly but surely undermined the Dual System and rendered its final collapse inevitable. Indeed for some time past it has merely owed its survival to the old age of the Emperor, who has a natural reluctance to destroy his own creation. For some years it has been known that his heir, Francis Ferdinand, was the advocate of far-reaching changes, which would have taken the form of a compromise between a federalist and a centralist system. His abrupt removal from the scene was secretly welcomed by all those whose political and racial monopoly was bound up with the existing _regime_.

German dominance in Austria, it should be added, meant a close alliance with the German Empire; and every fresh effort of the subject races to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from Germanising or Magyarising tendencies forged the chains of the alliance closer and increased the dependence of the Magyar oligarchy upon Berlin. As in mediaeval times, so in the twentieth century Habsburg policy is explained by two famous Latin mottoes--_Viribus unitis_ ("Union is strength") and _Divide et impera_ ("Divide and rule"). Between these two watchwords Francis Joseph and his advisers have wavered for sixty-five years.

What then are the forces which have held Austria-Hungary together under Francis Joseph? First unquestionably comes the dynasty; for it would be difficult to over-estimate the power exercised by the dynastic tradition on the many races under Habsburg sway. Next comes the Joint Army; for there is no finer body of men in Europe than the Austrian officers' corps, poorly paid, hard-worked, but inspired to the last man with unbounded devotion to the Imperial house, and to a large extent immune from that spirit of caste which is the most offensive feature of the allied German army.[1] Hardly less important are the Catholic Church, with its vast material resources and its powerful influence on peasant, small tradesman and court alike, and the bureaucracy, with its traditions of red tape, small-mindedness, slowness of movement and genial _Gemutlichkeit_ ("easy-goingness"). It is only _after_ these forces that we can fairly count the parliaments and representative government. And yet there are no fewer than twenty-three legislative bodies in the Monarchy--the two central parliaments of Vienna and Budapest, entirely distinct from each other; the two Delegations; the provincial Diets, seventeen in Austria, one in Croatia; and the Diet of Bosnia, whose every legislative act requires the ratification of the Joint Minister of Finance and of the Austrian and Hungarian Governments.

[Footnote 1: It is in no way a "preserve" of the aristocracy, being largely recruited from the middle and even lower-middle cla.s.s.]

Against all this there is one supremely disintegrating force--the principle of Nationality. Only a map can make clear the racial complications of the Dual Monarchy, and even the largest scale map fails to show how inextricably the various races are interwoven in many districts of Hungary or Bohemia. The following table offers at least a statistical survey:

(1) Racial-- Austria. Hungary. Bosnia.

Germans 9,950,266 2,037,435 ..

Czechs {6,435,983 .. ..

Slovaks { 1,967,970 ..

Poles 4,967,984 .. ..

Ruthenes 3,518,854 472,587 ..

Magyars (including 900,000 Jews) .. 10,050,575 ..

Croats } 783,334 1,833,162 {1,875,000 Serbs } 1,106,471 { Slovenes 1,252,940 .. ..

Roumanians 275,422 2,949,032 ..

Italians 768,422 27,307 ..

Others .. 374,105 ..

(2) Religious-- Roman Catholic 22,530,000 10,888,138 451,686 Uniate Catholic 3,417,000 2,025,508 ..