committee had been formed to draft the new constitution. The peace of Prague (Aug. 20, 1866), excluding Austria from Italy and Germany, made the fate of the Habsburg monarchy absolutely dependent upon a compromise with the Magyars. (For the Compromise or Ausgleich, see Austria-Hungary: History.) On the 7th of November 1866, the diet reassembled. The Compromise of 1867. On the 17th of February 1867 a responsible independent ministry was formed under Count Gyula Andrássy. On the 29th of May the new constitution was adopted by 209 votes to 89. Practically it was an amplification of the March Laws of 1848. The coronation took place on the 8th of June, on which occasion the king solemnly declared that he wished “a veil to be drawn over the past.” The usual coronation gifts he devoted to the benefit of the Honvéd invalids who had fought in the War of Independence. The reconciliation between monarch and people was assured.
Hungary was now a free and independent modern state; but the very completeness and suddenness of her constitutional victory made it impossible for the strongly flowing current of political life to keep within due bounds. The circumstance that the formation of political Parties in Independent Hungary. parties had not come about naturally, was an additional difficulty. Broadly speaking, there have been in Hungary since 1867 two parties: those who accept the compromise with Austria, and affirm that under it Hungary, so far from having surrendered any of her rights, has acquired an influence which she previously did not actually possess, and secondly, those who see in the compromise an abandonment of the essentials of independence and aim at the restoration of the conditions established in 1848. Within this broad division, however, have appeared from time to time political groups in bewildering variety, each adopting a party designation according to the exigencies of the moment, but each basing its programme on one or other of the theoretical foundations above mentioned. Thus, at the outset, the most heterogeneous elements were to be found both on the Left and Right. The Extreme Left was infected by the fanaticism of Kossuth, who condemned the compromise and refused to take the benefit of the amnesty, while the prelates and magnates who had originally opposed the compromise were now to be found by the side of Deák and Andrássy. The Deák party preserved its majority at the elections of 1869, but the Left Centre and Extreme Left returned to the diet considerably reinforced. The outbreak of the Franco-German War of 1870 turned the attention of the Magyars to Andrássy. foreign affairs. Andrássy never rendered a greater service to his country than when he prevented the imperial chancellor and joint foreign minister, Count Beust,[1] from intervening in favour of France. On the retirement of Beust in 1871, Andrássy was appointed his successor, the first instance, since Hungary came beneath the dominion of the Habsburgs, of an Hungarian statesman being entrusted with the conduct of foreign affairs. But, however gratifying such an elevation might be, it was distinctly prejudicial, at first, to Hungary’s domestic affairs, for no one else at this time, in Hungary, possessed either the prestige or the popularity of Andrássy. Within the next five years ministry followed ministry in rapid succession. A hopeless political confusion ensued. Few measures could be passed. The finances fell into disorder. The national credit was so seriously impaired abroad that foreign loans could only be obtained at ruinous rates of interest. During this period Deák had almost entirely withdrawn from public life. His last great speech was delivered on the 28th of June 1873, and he died on the 29th of January 1876. Fortunately, Kálmán Tisza. in Kálmán Tisza, the leader of the Liberal (Szabadelmü, i.e. “Free Principle”) party, he left behind him a statesman of the first rank, who for the next eighteen years was to rule Hungary uninterruptedly. From the first, Tisza was exposed to the violent attacks of the opposition, which embraced, not only the party of Independence, champions of the principles of 1848, but the so-called National party, led by the brilliant orator Count Albert Apponyi, which aimed at much the same ends but looked upon the Compromise of 1867 as a convenient substructure on which to build up the Magyar state. Neither could forgive Tisza for repudiating his earlier Radical policy, the so-called Bihar Programme (March 6, 1868), which went far beyond the Compromise in the direction of independence, and both attacked him with a violence which his unyielding temper, and the ruthless methods by which he always knew how to secure victory, tended ever to fan into fury. Yet Tisza’s aim also was to convert the old polyglot Hungarian kingdom into a homogeneous Magyar state, and the methods which he employed—notably the enforced magyarization of the subject races, which formed part of the reformed educational system introduced by him—certainly did not err on the side of moderation.[2] Whatever view may be held of Tisza’s policy in this respect, or of the corrupt methods by which he maintained his party in power,[3] there can be no doubt that during his long tenure of office—which practically amounted to a dictatorship—he did much to promote the astonishing progress of his country, which ran a risk of being stifled in the strife of factions. Himself a Calvinist, he succeeded in putting an end to the old quarrel of Catholic and Protestant and uniting them in a common enthusiasm for a race ideal; nominally a Liberal, he trampled on every Liberal principle in order to secure the means for governing with a firm hand; and if the political corruption of modern Hungary is largely his work,[4] to him also belongs the credit for the measures which have placed the country on a sound economic basis and the statesmanlike temper which made Hungary a power in the affairs of Europe. In this latter respect Tisza rendered substantial aid to the joint minister for foreign affairs by repressing the anti-Russian ardour of the Magyars on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, and by supporting Andrássy’s execution of the mandate from the Berlin Congress to Austria-Hungary for the occupation of Bosnia, against which the Hungarian opposition agitated for reasons ostensibly financial. Tisza’s policy on both these occasions increased his unpopularity in Hungary, but in the highest circles at Vienna he was now regarded as indispensable.
The following nine years mark the financial and commercial rehabilitation of Hungary, the establishment of a vast and original railway system which won the admiration of Europe, the liberation and expansion of her over-sea trade, the conversion of her national debt under Material progress. the most favourable conditions and the consequent equilibrium of her finances. These benefits the nation owed for the most part to Gábor Baross, Hungary’s greatest finance minister, who entered the cabinet in 1886 and greatly strengthened it. But the opposition, while unable to deny the recuperation of Hungary, shut their eyes to everything but Tisza’s “tyranny,” and their attacks were never so savage and unscrupulous as during the session of 1889, when threats of a revolution were uttered by the opposition leaders and the premier could only enter or leave the House under police protection. The tragic death of the crown prince Rudolph hushed for a time the strife of tongues, and in the meantime Tisza brought into the ministry Dezsö Szilágyi, the most powerful debater in the House, and Sándor Wekerle, whose solid talents had hitherto been hidden beneath the bushel of an under-secretaryship. But in 1890, during the debates on the Kossuth Repatriation Bill, the attacks on the premier were renewed, and on the 13th of March he placed his resignation in the king’s hands.
The withdrawal of Tisza scarcely changed the situation, but the period of brief ministries now began. Tisza’s successor,
- ↑ Beust was the only “imperial chancellor” in Austro-Hungarian history: even Metternich bore only the title of “chancellor”; and Andrássy, who succeeded Beust, styled himself “minister of the imperial and royal household and for foreign affairs.”
- ↑ See for this Mr Seton-Watson’s Racial Problems of Hungary, passim.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 168.
- ↑ Especially the Electoral Law of 1874, which established a very unequal distribution of electoral areas, a highly complicated franchise, and voting by public declaration, thus making it easy for the government to intimidate the electors and generally to gerrymander the elections.
