242 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



garians are a Tatar race ; and there cannot be a 

 more striking commentary on the fallaciousness 

 of explaining all national peculiarities by a cheap 

 reference to "blood" than is furnished by these 

 two peoples, the one being as highly endowed 

 with political good sense as the other is hopelessly 

 destitute of it. This is not the place to attempt 

 to explain the difference in detail as due to the 

 different circumstances amid which the two peo- 

 ples have been placed ; but there is no doubt that 

 their careers have been sufficiently different. In 

 the ninth century the Hungarians were as great a 

 terror to Christendom as the Turks were in the 

 fifteenth ; but the Magyars, after failing to break 

 through the bulwark of Christianized Germans, 

 which the genius of Charles the Great had pre- 

 pared for such emergencies, settled down quietly 

 in Pannonia to which they have given the 

 name of Hungary and became converted to the 

 Roman form of Christianity. But in the course 

 of this settlement the Magyars interfered seri- 

 ously with the integrity of the Slavonic communi- 

 ties on the Danube. They tore away a consider- 

 able portion of Croatia and Serbia, and subjected 

 so many Slavic tribes that at the present day the 

 Slavs outnumber the Magyars, even within the 

 limits of Hungary itself. 1 

 1 In 1850 the population of Hungary was thus divided : Magyars, 



