540 INTERNATIONAL LAW 



gary he is merely King; the two titles, imperial and royal, are 

 distinct and equal in dignity; they designate (as my hearers will 

 remember) two widely different prerogatives, the mixture of which 

 is hardly conceivable even in juridical fiction. It is quite as absurd 

 to think of the Emperor of Austria as ruler of Hungary as it would 

 be absurd to fancy the King of Hungary as reigning in Austria or any 

 part of her. To our public law the Emperor of Austria is a foreign 

 sovereign. 



The next striking fact is the above-mentioned legislation of 1848, 

 which, by giving precise shape to parliamentary government in 

 Hungary, and by making every act of royal prerogative dependent 

 in its legal value on the signature of Hungarian constitutional 

 advisers, made the distinctness and diversity of the two juridical 

 personalities meeting in one physical person, the Emperor's and the 

 King's, and of the two prerogatives vested in that same person, 

 evident to all eyes. From an abstract truth, often obscured by 

 the practice of a system of personal government not very anxious 

 to uphold it, this distinction became a living reality, no more to 

 be ignored. The winning of such a practical guarantee to our 

 national independence is, besides the democratic reform which it 

 has effected, the immortal glory of that legislation. 



War, victorious at first, disastrous after the crushing intervention 

 of Russia, came next, followed by a period of absolute oppression 

 which lasted from 1849 till 1867. But all this belongs to the domain 

 of mere fact; it did in no way alter the legal continuity of the prin- 

 ciples on which our connection with Austria rests; it did not weaken 

 in right the independence of the Hungarian Kingdom, though sus- 

 pending it in fact for a time. There had been times of oppression, 

 almost as hard as this one, before; at such times Hungary, while 

 powerless to prevail against superior material forces, had always 

 stuck to legal continuity, waiting patiently until a turning of the 

 tide should enable her to bring practical reality in concordance with 

 juridical truth; but of that juridical truth she never gave up one 

 single atom, and she always lived to see it prevail against wholesale 

 oppression as well as against partial encroachments. 1867 was the 

 year of one of these resurrections; at the same time, it created new 

 rules concerning the practice of our connection with Austria, rules 

 which, however, left the principle of that connection the independ- 

 ence of Hungary as a sovereign nation unaltered, as a rapid survey 

 of them will show. 



Ill 



The celebrated transaction called the Compromise of 1867 is 

 embodied in the Law XII of that year. In its first (declaratory) 



