It is true that when the magnitude of the Jewish influx became perceptible, and in particular, when the Jews began to move in large numbers into the professions, official disapproval could not make all non-Jews in Hungary wholly convinced that the difference of religion between Jew and non-Jew was a mere incidental, not affecting a fundamental identity, nor prevent some Hungarians from wondering whether the nation could really digest such a large and powerful new element without its own character undergoing a change. The question was, however, asked more often than it was answered, at least with a decided negative.
But this apart, a certain feeling was always present (perhaps on both sides) that the bourgeois professions, and also the practitioners of them, whatever their ethnic origin, were not quite an integral part of Hungarian life. Largely as a consequence of this, the bourgeoisie as a class never even attempted to play an independent political role. Its members rather attached themselves, sometimes invisibly, to other parties. In the Tisza era, they nearly always supported the Liberals. Only round the turn of the century did the urban middle classes produce something of their own in the shape of a number of circles and associations of young intellectuals, largely but by no means exclusively Jewish, who initiated a movement for political and social reform on democratic lines. The most important of these groups, which numbered among its members several men destined later to play considerable political roles, was best known from the periodical issued by it, the Huszadik Szàzad (Twentieth Century).
The Parliamentary and social life of Hungary continued therefore to be dominated by its traditional landlord class, which continued to divide, in its members’ own eyes and those of others, and to some extent institutionally, into the traditional classes of the magnates and the lesser men, for whom the name ‘gentry’ came in these years to supersede the older one of ‘nobiles bene possessionati’. As between these, the magnates had maintained their institutional and social lead, and had also come off better economically. The land reform had hit many of them only very lightly, owing to the high proportion of allodial land in their estates, and their punctually paid compensation, coming to them at a time when the price of wheat was very high, had often enabled them, not only to modernize their existing estates, but to buy from distressed smaller neighbours more acres than they had had to cede to their rustical peasants. Later, they had been able to obtain credit with relative facility. The proportion of the soil of Hungary held in very large estates, huge as it had been before 1848, consequently actually increased in the following decades. An agrarian census taken in 1895 showed that just under 4,000 proprietors, mainly, although not entirely, private individuals,54 then held between them, in estates of 1,000 hold or more, twelve of the 41·7 million hold at which the cultivable area of Hungary-Croatia was then reckoned, this excluding properties consisting solely of forest or rough grazing; had these been counted in, the share of the mammoth estates would have been larger still.55 Some of the individual estates were enormous: Prince Esterhazy’s alone covered 516,000 hold, those of Prince Schönborn, 241,000, of the Counts Károlyi, 174,000, of Prince Festetics, 161,000, of the Archduke Friedrich, 145,000, of the Prince of Coburg-Gotha, 141,000.
A fair proportion of these estates were entailed, for between 1867 and 1912 Francis Joseph sanctioned the formation of sixty new fidei-commissa, making ninety-two in all. Thirty-five per cent of the area of the country was now entailed.
As individuals, the gentry had not survived the political and economic storms nearly so well. Many families had been ruined by the land reform and even more by the agricultural depression. Ancestrally regarded, the gentry of 1900 were largely a class of new men. In this sense, the Hungarian writers who describe the decay of the old gentry class as one of the major social features of this period, are justified. The newcomers to it had, however, adopted their predecessors’ traditional outlook on life and way of living with such remarkable facility and completeness, that it would have taken a genealogist’s eye to distinguish between the two elements; all its members were, in all essentials, the true successors of the old bene possessionati who had so long disputed, and shared, with the magnates the internal running of Hungary.
There were, as there had always been, a considerable number of points of difference between these two classes, or sub-classes. The natural and traditional rivalry between the smaller man and the larger was generally accentuated by a political difference, again traditional, on the Issue of Public Law; for while there were many exceptions, some of them very conspicuous, it was usual, as it had been before 1848, for the smaller men to be more national, while the magnates stood nearer to the Court and included more of the Gesammemonarchie within their mental horizons.56 Some members of the very greatest families almost dissociated themselves from any special relationship with Hungary, except as a source of income, and those who did not go quite so far as this usually regarded themselves as the exponents of the Crown in Hungary.
These differences sometimes took demonstrative form. Excluded by the insufficient blueness of their blood from Széchenyi’s Casino, the gentry founded a Casino of their own,57 and there even existed something rather vague called the ‘gentry movement’. None of these things, indeed, kept the two classes from presenting a front of perfect solidarity towards the outer world.
It should be added that while the years before 1867 brought the magnates political advantage also at the expense of the gentry, the trend thereafter was in the opposite direction. The Compromise was itself the fruit and expression of a political reconciliation between the Crown and the gentry, and after it Francis Joseph had no need to continue to seek an alliance which in any case had proved ineffectual, and was now superfluous. The truth of this statement is not affected by the fact that 50% of his Ministers President after 1867, and 34% of all Ministers, were of magnate families: such was his personal idiosyncrasy, and the figure was in any case far lower than in Austria. Ministerial figures apart, the weight of Parliamentary importance was inevitably shifting to the Lower House,58 and outside Parliament, the gentry continued to command the Counties. The Counties themselves were, indeed, losing ground to the bureaucracy; but the bureaucracy was itself now largely stocked with members of gentry families, and if the sons of magnates entered it, they had to fight their way up its ladder on equal terms with other people. The Permanent Head of a Ministry was no longer automatically a son of a great house – nor, for that matter, was an Archbishop.
It is true that Parliamentary influence was not always the same as effective political power, for behind the scenes, other influences were often stronger than those of the greatest landlord. Not the least reason for the Liberal Party’s prolonged tenure of office was the tacit (but notorious) alliance which existed between it and the Jewish capitalist interests. Nationalist writers often complained that Hungary was really ruled by an unholy partnership of ‘feudal magnates and Jewish bankers’, while Lueger, from Vienna, described the Liberal Party as controlled by Jews. These words, spiteful as they were, contained much truth. It is interesting that the financial unity of the Monarchy, which was the financiers’ chief concern, suffered fewer impairments than Francis Joseph’s special interest, the formal unity of the organization of the armed forces.
*
The magnates were, of course, very few, and even the gentry, only a relatively small élite. While no definition of that class existed, it can be taken as roughly equivalent to that of the owners of estates of 200–1,000 hold, of whom there were, in 1895, about 10,000 (3,200 estates of 500–1,000 and 6,700 of 200–500). Below them the pyramid broadened out: there were 10,800 estates of 100–200 hold, 39,000 of 50–100, 235,000 of 20–50 and 460,000 of 10–20.
These medium and small independent farmers formed an important factor in the country’s economic life, but not an independent political one. The national tradition, which was reinforced by administrative pressure, that the governance of Hungary was a matter for its substantial landlords, was strong enough to defy the numerical paucity of that class. The
smaller men, whether ranking socially as gentle-folk or peasants, dutifully obeyed this unwritten law and unless they were non-Magyars, when if they possessed a vote (but more often they did not) they might cast it for a national party, voted ’67 or ’48, according to the opinion entertained by or prescribed to them on the Issue of Public Law.
The broad base of the pyramid, meanwhile, was composed of a great mass of dwarf-holders and landless men, who were existing in a condition of complete political impotence and great social degradation, and of extreme material misery.
The land reform had, as we have seen, been generous to its beneficiaries, the rustical peasants, in requiring no compensation from them. But the beneficiaries had constituted little more than one-third of the total rural population, and even to them it had come as no more of an unmixed blessing, in economic results, than it had to the Austrian peasants. In Hungary, too, there were real gainers, commonest among the thrifty German peasants of the South, who had also early adopted the habit of family limitation. But very many ex-rusticalists, even in the earliest years after the reform, had found the difficulties of equipping themselves (credit was even shorter and more expensive in Hungary than in Austria) and of meeting the tax-collector’s demands, insuperable, and had simply reverted to a modernized form of their old servitude,59 in which they were even joined by many sandalled nobles now deprived of their only asset, the robot. Even the smallholders had, however, profited by the high agricultural prices prevailing for some twenty years after the reform, and seem to have maintained themselves fairly well during these years; but the advent of the great agricultural depression of the 1880s, coinciding with a growth of population which far outstripped the development of outlets for it off the land, brought a very abrupt deterioration. A large number of peasant proprietors were ruined altogether,60 and sub-division of holdings set in on a large scale. The agricultural census of 1895 showed over 400,000 holdings of 5–10 hold in the Kingdom and 110,000 in Croatia, 717,000 and 126,000 respectively of 1–5, 563,000 and 54,000 of less than one, and nearly 1,700,000 persons (wage-earners) totally landless.
The figures for the dwarf-holdings of course include vineyards and market gardens which could provide their owner or lessee with a comfortable existence enough even where only a few acres in extent; many of them, especially of the vineyards, were, moreover, owned by persons who derived only part of their livelihoods from them. A large part were, however, purely agricultural holdings whose owners had no other means of subsistence, and the greater part of these fell below the subsistence level.61
The condition of the landless men had undergone a similar deterioration. In the first years after the land reform, when labour was very short, especially in districts where robot had been widely used, the ex-zsellers or members of peasant families willing to supply it had been able to command good wages. These years were followed by the era of the great public works – the construction of the railways, the regulation of the Tisza, and other enterprises – so that labour on the estates was still in short supply, so much so that some landlords were importing harvest labour from Italy and Dalmatia.62 Wages were still good, as were those earned by the navvies. Then came the 1880s. The public works slackened off, and the landlords, themselves in difficulties, mechanized (although less than in Austria) to save labour, and where they still had to pay wages, cut them. The biggest cuts, as in Galicia, were those made in the harvest labourers’ share in kind, and the worst sufferers that class, now a very large one (it included many dwarf-holders, as well as men entirely landless) who depended almost entirely on this work, living from harvest to harvest on the share which they took home of the crop harvested by them. But the farm-hands suffered too, since now the supply of labour exceeded the demand.
The destitution which had now come to prevail among the dwarf-holders and landless men was terrifying. An inquiry undertaken in 189663 showed that the seasonal workers when away from their homes often lived exclusively on bread, only very rarely getting warm food. In one Carpathian district, the inhabitants ‘lived exclusively on potatoes in vinegar, without fat or meat’; in another, ‘exclusively on beans, dry or mixed with maize flour, boiled or roast potatoes in cabbage soup or on raw cabbage, or on a wretched maize bread’, etc.
The poverty of the labourer was due not only to the lowness of the wage paid to him for a working day, but also to the fact that his working days did not, as a rule, exceed 70–90 in a year. The long winters of enforced idleness also reduced the earnings of the small peasants and dwarf-holders, while the development of the factories had cut off the subsidiary earnings with which their womenfolk had formerly helped out the family budget.
There had been a similar decline in conditions off the land. When the period opened, Hungary possessed a fairly extensive artisan class, which lived modestly but sufficiently. When the factories began to expand on a large scale, skilled labour was still very scarce. Its exponents were often imported from Austria or Germany,64 and were able to command relatively high wages and good conditions. But things got worse when the use of machinery became more general and when the surplus population from the country began flocking into the towns. The Liberal philosophy of the day favoured the free operation of the law of supply and demand, and the landlords opposed high wages in industry as tending to draw labour off the land. It was also generally (and not unreasonably) argued by the Government and the employers that Hungary could not afford to let either wages or conditions advance ahead of those in Austria. In fact, wages moved on much the same level: an inquiry in 1900 showed that 28% of the men for whom data were available were earning 14–20 kr. a week, 48% 6–14 and 15% less than 6. Women earned proportionately less. Hours of work for child and juvenile labour were limited by a law passed in 1884, but those of adults (as in Austria) left unlimited. In 1900 an inquiry showed that the commonest working day in factories was 12 hours, inclusive of breaks; 9 or 10 for women. Housing conditions in Budapest were even worse than in Vienna; in 1910 nearly 10% of the population lived 10 or more to a room, only 6·3% one or two to a room. Some people lived in caves or holes dug in fields; in 1905 a police search revealed 35 individuals roosting in trees, having tied themselves on with ropes.
Meanwhile, the fortunes of the artisan class had been similar to those of its Austrian counterpart. The relative weakness of the competition from the factories had made its decline slower, but its position at the end of the century was perceptibly worse than half a century before.
In recording these facts we must, indeed, beware of adopting without reservation the fashionable picture which contrasts the destitution which undoubtedly prevailed at one end of the social scale with a supposed limitless abundance at the other. The truth was that in 1902 Hungary was still a poor country. It had been backward when the period opened, and the fields towards which its development had then been chiefly directed had, largely owing to circumstances beyond the nation’s control, proved to be particularly unlucrative. The development had thus produced only a moderate accession of national wealth: economists have calculated that on the eve of the First World War, Hungary’s total national wealth was only just over half of Austria’s, whose population was only about 20% larger;65 and Austria itself was poor by West European standards, not to speak of American. There were, of course, wealthy men in Hungary, but especially on the land, the supposed darlings of fortune were usually not nearly so rich as they looked. The Esterházys of the day no longer built themselves palaces like Esterháza or Kismarton (in general, few of the great country houses of Hungary date from the Liberal era), nor stood themselves luxuries like Prince Miklos’s famous uniform of pearls. If the great estates survived, it was even more true of Hungary than of Austria that most of the rent-rolls from them went into other pockets than those of their nominal owners. The lord of less than 1,000 hold usually lived modestly indeed, except in so far as his estates provided him with abundance of food and wine, and domestic service was cheap and plentiful. More big fortunes were probably made out of industry, than off t
he land, but as Hungarian writers often emphasize, by no means all the plus values created by the Hungarian workers remained in the country.66 This was even more true of the financial system, where the profits were probably biggest of all; the Hungarian finance houses (which owned much of the industry) were largely subsidiaries of concerns having their headquarters in Vienna, or even further afield.
The fact that part of the picture was not so brilliantly white as is often supposed does not, however, make the other part of it less dark, and the fact remained that nearly one-half of the population of Hungary was living on sub-human material standards, and that for long years the regime spent far more effort on preventing them from revolting against their condition, than on trying to improve it.
The industrial workers had never been entirely denied a right to organize. The compositors had founded their own Trade Union (disguised as a mutual benefit association) as early as 1861, and on their initiative, a ‘General Workers’ Association’ had been brought into being in 1869, the Government raising no objections. In 1870, however, indiscreet demonstrations in favour of the Paris Commune had thrown the authorities into a panic which had led to exaggerated measures of repression. A law enacted in 1872, and re-enacted with amendments in 1884, declared association and strikes lawful, but made incitement to strike a punishable offence, and every form of association, including the Trade Unions, had to be non-political.
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