for decades the policy of the Hungarian Government toward the Slovaks. Some time ago the American Slovaks formulated a demand for autonomy in a memorandum which they sent to influential friends and to those whom they hope to win as friends. The memorandum “voices the sentiment and national aspirations, not only of Slovaks living in the United States, but also interprets the mind and the will of their brothers, inhabiting, since times immemorial, the ancestral homelands of the race.” That the American Slovaks took the initiative in issuing the memorandum is not hard to understand. “The Slovaks at home are not permitted to approach their king with grievances, the last deputation to him having been denied admittance. Slovaks, therefore, are made to feel that they have no king, only a government—a government, however, that knows no mercy, that feels no remorse, that offers no hope, that fears no punishment. If Slovaks are resolved to speak at all, if they wish the world at large to know the measure of their wrongs, under existing conditions, they can only appeal through the medium of their compatriots in the United States.”
Of the Magyars as a nation the Slovaks do not complain. It is the Hungarian Government which they accuse of oppression.
