Variety of races in Hungary-Wallacks or Roumains-Statistics-Savage outbreak of the Wallacks in former years-Panslavic ideas-Roumanians and their origin-Priests of the Greek Church-Destruction of forests-Spirit of Communism-Incendiary fires.

The mixture of races in Hungary is a puzzle to any outsider. There is the original substratum of Slavs, overlaid by Szeklers, Magyars, German immigrants, Wallacks, Rusniacks, Jews, and gipsies. An old German writer has quaintly described the characteristics of these various peoples in the following manner:-

"To the great national kitchen the Magyar contributes bread, meat, and wine; the Rusniack and Wallack, salt from the salt pits of Marmaros; the Slavonian, bacon, for Slavonia furnishes the greatest number of fattened pigs; the German gives potatoes and vegetables; the Italian, rice; the Slovack, milk, cheese, and butter, besides table-linen, kitchen utensils, and crockery ware; the Jew supplies the Hungarian with money; and the gipsy furnishes the entertainment with music."

Coming to hard facts, the latest statistics of M. Keleti give 15,417,327 as the total population of Hungary. Of these 2,470,000 are Wallacks, who since the nationality fever has set in desire to be called Roumains; and if you say Roman at once, they will be still better pleased. They were in old time the overflow of Wallachia, now forming part of the Roumanian Principality. The first historical irruption of the Wallacks was about the end of the fourteenth century, when they became a terrible pest to the German settlers in Transylvania, dreaded by them as much as Turk or Tartar. They burned and pillaged the lands and villages of the peaceful dwellers in the Saxon settlement; but at length they had become so numerous that the law took cognisance of their existence and reduced them to a state of serfdom, from which they were not relieved till 1848.

A subject race has always its wrongs, and there is no doubt the haughty Magyar nobles treated the Wallacks with great harshness and indignity. It was the old story-good masters were kind to their serfs, but those less fortunate had a bad time of it, what with forced labour and other burdens. "A lord is a lord even in hell" is the saying of the peasants.

Mr Paget[6] tells the story of an old countess he met in Transylvania, who used to lament that "times were sadly changed, peasants were no longer so respectful as they used to be; she could remember walking to church on the backs of the peasants, who knelt down in the mud to allow her to pass over them without soiling her shoes. She could also remember, though less partial to the recollection, a rising of the peasantry, when nothing but the kindness with which her mother had generally treated them saved her from the cruel death which many of her neighbours met with."

The rising here mentioned took place in 1784, when two Wallacks named Hora and Kloska were the leaders of a terrible onslaught upon the Magyar nobles. The Vienna Government was accused on this occasion of being very tardy in sending troops to quell the insurrection. It was the time when the unpopular reforms of Joseph II. were so ill received by the Magyars, and no good feeling subsisted between Hungary and the Central Government.

But the most frightful outbreak of the Wallacks was, as we all know, within living memory. You can hear from the lips of witnesses descriptions of horrors committed not thirty years ago in Transylvania. Entire villages were destroyed, whole families slaughtered, down to the new-born infant.

The arms of the Wallacks were supplied by Austria, for whom they were acting as a sort of militia at the time of Hungary's war of independence. The Vienna Government has been very fond of playing off the Wallacks and the Slavs against the Magyars: they have kept the pot always simmering; if some fine day it boils over, they will have the fat in the fire.

Of course in Southern Hungary one hears enough about the Panslavic movement, and Panslavic ideas. "The idea of Panslavism had a purely literary origin," observes Sir Gardiner Wilkinson in his book on Dalmatia. "It was started by Kolla, a Protestant clergyman of the Slavonic congregation at Pesth, who wished to establish a national literature by circulating all works written in the various Slavonic dialects.... The idea of an intellectual union of all these nations naturally led to that of a political one; and the Slavonians seeing that their numbers amounted to about one-third of the whole population of Europe, and occupied more than half its territory, began to be sensible that they might claim for themselves a position to which they had not hitherto aspired."

But the Wallacks, or, as we will now call them, Roumains, are not Slavs at all; they are utterly distinct in race, though they are co-religionists with the Southern Slavs. "The Roumanians," says Mr Freeman,[7] "speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slave nor Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin not to any of their neighbours, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain." He is inclined to think these so-called Dacians are the surviving representatives of the great Thracian race.

Who they were is, after all, not so important a question as what they are, these two millions and a half of Roumains in Hungary. To put the statistical figures in another way, Mr. Boner,[8] writing in 1865, calculates that the Roumains, naturalised in Southern Hungary, number 596 out of every 1000 souls in Transylvania. The fecundity of the race is remarkable, they threaten to overwhelm the Saxons, whose numbers, on the other hand, are seriously on the decrease. They are also supplanting the Magyars in Southern Hungary.

I have myself seen villages which I was told had been exclusively Magyar, but which are now as exclusively Roumain. It is even possible to find churches where the service conducted in the Magyar tongue has ceased to be understood by the congregation.

To meet a Roumain possessed even of the first rudiments of education is an exception to the rule: even their priests are deplorably ignorant; but when we find them in receipt of such a miserable stipend as 100 florins, indeed in some cases 30 florins a-year, it speaks for itself that they belong to the poorest class. The Wallacks lead their lives outside the pale of civilisation; they are without the wants and desires of a settled life. Very naturally the manumission of the serfs in 1848 found them utterly unprepared for their political freedom. Neither by nature or by tradition are they law-respecting; in fact, they are very much the reverse.

The Roumain is a Communist pure and simple; the uneducated among them know no other political creed. It is not that of the advanced school of Communism, which deals with social theories, but a simple consistent belief that, as they themselves express it, "what God makes grow belongs to one and all alike." In this spirit he helps himself to the fruit in his neighbour's garden when too lazy to cultivate the ground for himself.

This child of nature is by instinct a nomadic shepherd and herdsman; he hates forests, and will ruthlessly burn down the finest trees to make a clearing for sheep-pastures. It is impossible to travel twenty miles in the Southern Carpathians without encountering the terrible ravages committed by these people in the beautiful woods that adorn the sides of the mountains.

"The Wallacks find it too much trouble to fell the trees," says Mr Boner. "They destroy systematically: one year the bark is stripped off, the wood dries, and the year after it is fired.... In 1862, near Toplitza, 23,000 joch of forest were burned by the peasantry."

Judging from what I saw during my travels in Hungary in 1875-76, I should say the evil described by Mr Boner ten years before has in no way abated. The Wallacks pursue their ruthless destruction of the forests, and the law seems powerless to arrest the mischief. At present there is wood and enough, but the time will come when the country at large must suffer from this reckless waste. There are about twenty-three million acres of forest in Hungary, including almost the only oak-woods left in Europe. The great proportion of the forest-land belongs to the State, hence the supervision is less keen, and the depredations more readily winked at. Riding one day with a Hungarian friend, I asked what would be the probable cost of a wooden house then building on the verge of the forest. My friend replied, laughing, "That depends on whether the builder stole the wood himself, or only bought it of some one else who had stolen it; he might possibly have purchased the wood from the real owner, but that is not very probable. So you see I really cannot tell you what the house will cost."

Incendiary fires are very common in Hungary. Here, again, the Wallacks do their share of mischief. If they have a grudge against an active magistrate or a thriving neighbour, his farmstead is set on fire, not once, but many times probably. Added to this, the Wallack takes an actual pleasure in wanton destruction. As an instance, an English company who are working coal mines in the neighbourhood of Orsova have been obliged within the last two years to relay their railway from the mines to the Danube no less than three times, in consequence of the Wallacks persistently destroying the permanent way and stealing the rails.

Notwithstanding all this the Wallacks are not without their good points. They become capital workmen under certain circumstances, and they possess an amount of natural intelligence which promises better things as the result of education. "Barring his weakness for tobacco and spirits, the much-abused Wallack is a useful fellow to the sportsman and the traveller," said a sporting friend of mine who visits Transylvania nearly every autumn.

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