530 INTERNATIONAL LAW 



allied itself for certain purposes and under certain conditions to the 

 equally independent and distinct Empire of Austria, by an act of 

 sovereign free will, without having ever abdicated the smallest 

 particle of its sovereignty as an independent nation, though it has 

 consented to exercise a small part of its governmental functions 

 through executive organs common with Austria. If the term of 

 " concession " is to be used at all, it is Hungary who has granted 

 some concessions, by concurring in the creation of such common 

 organs of government; she had none to ask for, as there is no earthly 

 power placed above her entitled to control her, and as she is possessor 

 of all the attributes of a sovereign nation. That Austrian Europe 

 which is supposed to include Hungary has no existence except in 

 false theory and in former oppressive practice; in public law it 

 always was and now in fact is a nonentity. Even the term " Austro- 

 Hungarian Empire ' : -what -the German calls Das Reich --is a 

 false one; and the officially used term " Austro-Hungarian Mon- 

 archy" (not a very happy because a misleading one) can be accepted, 

 as we shall see, only in the sense of their personal union under a 

 monarch, physically one, but representing two distinct personalities 

 of public law, the Emperor and the King, and of their joint action 

 in questions of peace and war; but an objectively unified body 

 containing both Hungary and Austria does not exist. 



From the moment you have well grasped these fundamental 

 truths, on which no Hungarian even admits discussion, it is like a 

 falling of scales from your eyes, and everything at once becomes 

 clear and all facts are easily accounted for. To bring them into full 

 evidence I must trouble my hearers with some briefly sketched 

 peculiarities of our constitutional development and with a short 

 outline of the events which brought about and shaped our connection 

 with Austria. 



The Hungarian constitution is as old as the Hungarian nation 

 herself, at least as old as anything history knows of her. No written 

 document exists which could be called the Hungarian constitution; 

 no illustrious lawgiver or set of lawgivers is entitled to the praise 

 of having framed her. She is the product of organic evolution, 

 worked out through centuries by the genius of the nation, in uninter- 

 rupted continuity; her principles and rules must be collected from 

 numbers of laws, customs, and precedents, reaching as far back as 

 the eleventh century. In this respect there is an analogy between 

 the growth of the English and of the Hungarian constitution, which 

 is the more striking because the two racial individualities are as 

 dissimilar as they well could be, and because there is no trace of 

 mutual influence in their development. Even some dates happen 



