17 MARCH 1849, Page 14

For more than a century Austria and Hungary have continued

to maintain an amicable union : how does it now happen that we find the descendants of those who rose as one man to save the throne of Maria Theresa—who turned a deaf ear to the offer of a separate and independent existence from Napoleon—now arrayed in arms against Austria? The Austrian journals, which choose to ascribe this state of things to the sole influence of Kossuth, in reality attribute to his eloquence something more than it merits. A distinguished and a remarkable man indeed he is ; but his elo- quence would not have driven a nation into rebellion, nor raised regular armies, nor maintained them in the field. The struggle is, in short, a national one, which, although he plays an important part in it, does not depend solely upon himself. The Hungarians are fighting for their nationality, which they hold to be threat- ened by the system of the Austrian Ministry. Nor is this nation- ality a vague and misty idea, the imaginative reconstruction of a perished history, like that of the Irish, or of the Bohemians, who still dream of the great Moravian empire of Svatopluk ; but it is the complex product of their national institutions, hitherto gua- ranteed to them by every successive king in his coronation-oath : in accordance with it, and in obedience to the law of the land, the whole administration has been hitherto in the hands of native Hungarians. For nationality consists, not as Slavonian !and German professors teach, in identity of language, still less in identity of race, but in identity of interests, of habits, of institu- tions, and of history. The Austrian Ministry is struggling for a

closer unity of the Empire : Hungary, not unnaturally jealous of change, will not give up her ancient constitution.

It should be borne in mind, that the struggle on the part of the Hungarians is not for the maintenance of class privileges or the special interests of a caste. This has been too often asserted here, in defiance of the truth. That the nobles were a privileged class, will not be denied ; but they were not such a class as the oli- garchs of Russia : the nobles were the franchise-bearing class, not a small fraction of the population, removed to an immeasur- able distance above, and tyrannizing over the rest: the passage from one division into the other was neither difficult nor rare. Still it must be admitted that there were grievances in the ine- quality of taxation, and drawbacks upon the national prosperity in the nature of the prevalent copyhold tenures. And it must ever be remembered to their credit, that the privileged class themselves—the only privileged class of whom history can make such honourable mention—in a succession of Diets extend- ing over the last quarter of a century, have brought forward mea- sure after measure for the purpose of divesting themselves of those personal advantages which they were convinced were opposed to the universal welfare. The chief opposition that they met with in this career of improvement was ever offered by the Austrian Government itself; which in all its dependencies maintained the immoral mode of ruling by keeping alive hostility between the different classes of its subjects. All that remained of ancient abuses was finally swept away in the Diet which closed on the 11th of April 1848, and whose acts received the solemn ratifica- tion of the Emperor Ferdinand, in his capacity of King of Hun- gary. Thus alone is it to be explained, that in the camp of De- briezen we see representatives of all the populations of Hungary, and of every class of society. The Servians, indeed, and the Saxons of Transylvania, form an exception which the enemies of liberty gladly dwell upon : but both these races have had their separate institutions, and have therefore always stood more apart from the Magyars. But the Slavonians, the Germans of the Zips and the Banat, the Wallachians, all rushed to arms when the Emperor Francis Joseph refused to add to his titles the regal crown of Hungary, and instead of taking the constitutional oath in presence of the Hungarian Diet, assented to the plans of the Austrian Ministry, by which the constitution and fundamental laws of Hungary were at once abrogated.

Such is the Hungarian case, and it is worthy of all considera- tion. But since the Austrian Ministry has broken entirely with the history of the past to enter on a career of revolution and re- construction, the arguments and pleas of the past are in agreat degree out of date. It is a struggle for power, in which liberal Hungary appears as the conservative standing on the old ways- once-absolute Austria, as the revolutionist contending for a new order of things.