Читать книгу The Birth of Yugoslavia - Henry Baerlein - Страница 95

The Southern Slavs had recently been shown that if they waited in the hope that others would assist them to improve their fortunes they would have to have a monumental patience. When Austria, after her defeat at the hand of the Prussians, was flung out of the German federation, she availed herself of the services of a German, Count Frederick Beust, to put her house in order. His negotiations with Hungary produced the compromise, the Ausgleich, of 1867. This Constitution, which made them independent of each other as regards internal matters, bade their Slavs prepare themselves to lose all shreds of independence. The Serbs of the Banat and Bačka, as well as the Roumanians of Transylvania and the Slovaks, were delivered to the Magyars without any guarantee that their language or their nationality would be respected. "Look!" said the Magyars in after years, when travellers came to see what they had done, "we have a language law, evolved by Deak, which lays down that everybody in the law courts has the right to use his mother-tongue." The traveller had been wondering what unusual people lived in Hungary, for he had seen a peasant choose precisely that time when a train was due to come and quarrel about something with the booking clerk. How was the traveller to learn that the non-Magyar peasant wished to buy a ticket for his native village, whose name had just been Magyarized, and that the clerk refused to sell a ticket except the peasant used a name he did not know? And when the peasant had walked home he might see in the village register that he who had been Saba was now Shebek and that his friend Ziva, who could speak no word of Magyar, was now Vitaljos; and that the children of poor Vitaljos, in order that they should not suffer from their father's handicap, were not confining their education to ordinary subjects, but were learning the Magyar language for seventeen hours every week. Well, how was your traveller to know that if a person used his own tongue in the law courts, which was very probably the tongue of everyone who lived there save a handful of officials, one of these officials who was accidentally in court would say he was acquainted with that person's language? The judge would take his word for it and he would start interpreting. When the Hungarians came to deal with the Croats they were careful to give them, for the world's eye, a great deal of autonomy. Strossmayer, assisted by the historian Rački, had in April 1866 led a deputation to Buda-Pest when it was clear that extreme divergencies existed between the Croats and the Magyars. Among other Croatian demands was one that Rieka should no longer be the scene of Magyar intrigues. As yet the town's importance was not great: in 1869 she had only 17,884 inhabitants and the total of her exports and imports did not exceed 150,000 tons. But everybody knew that by the building of a direct line to Croatia and to the valleys of the Save, the Drave and the Danube there would come an era of prosperity. The Magyars had allied themselves with the Autonomist party, showing them what great advantages the town would reap if it were joined to Hungary. Would not Hungary, for instance, be able to manipulate the railway freights? There had been constant bickerings between the Croats and the Autonomist party, so that Strossmayer's deputation asked that the Magyars should refrain from giving to the latter their financial and moral support. But the Magyars had no such intention. "One should try to convince everyone," said Rački, "that in national politics the Magyars and ourselves stand at the Antipodes. We see in the Slav and Yugoslav solidarity the most powerful guarantee for our national future, whereas the Magyars see in it the tomb of their nationality. We consider the liberation of the East as a condition of a happier future, while the Magyars regard it as the beginning of their absolute ruin or at least as the end of their aspirations for the sole dominion. The idea of a Yugoslav State, arising in Croatia or in Bosnia or Serbia, would always find in Hungary a most determined foe." It was thus improbable that any satisfactory arrangement would be made, particularly as the Austrians, oblivious to all that Jellačić had done for them, were quite prepared to give their erstwhile enemies, the Magyars, a free hand. And what the Magyars did was to confer upon Croatia this autonomy for educational and legal and religious matters, while they reserved financial, railway, fiscal and commercial questions, military legislation and the laws relating to the roads and rivers in which both were interested—all these subjects they reserved for the Parliament at Buda-Pest, in which, of course, the Croats formed an impotent minority. Francis Joseph on May 1, 1867, sent a message to Zagreb in which he stated that "the pourparlers with the Kingdom of Hungary, which to him was always dear and faithful, had led to the desired results." He trusted that the Croats would be represented at his coronation at Buda-Pest. Strossmayer was ordered to bring this about; he went instead to the Paris Exhibition. He and the National party prepared themselves for a severe struggle. But now Baron Levin Rauch, of infamous memory, was nominated as Ban. He at once altered the electoral laws, so that the National party came back with only fourteen deputies. If any one in Western Europe thought about the Croats it was with the traditional aversion for the way in which they had behaved to the most noble Kossuth. This was years before the time when Dr. Seton-Watson, as it may interest him to hear, defeated the Magyarophil candidate at an election in the town of Ogulin. The bright idea occurred to somebody to whisper it abroad that Dr. Seton-Watson would arrive that day in order to make notes of the election for the British Press. With Rauch's obedient majority a compromise, the Nagodba, was arranged with Hungary. The terms of this, subordinating Croatia economically and financially to Buda-Pest, are what one would expect; the chief novelty concerns Rieka, as to which port no agreement had been reached.