LAND AND WATER 
December o, 1914:. 
Vlom is the kingcl<im of Hungary, governed from 
Buda-Pest. Consider the following two sketch 
maps, in which I attempt to express for the Car- 
^'V.. -- 
<^^-\ OA^^ POLAND 
SLRVIA i\ \. 
pathian region the curious medley of political 
boundaries, ruling interests, and real boundaries, 
racial and religious. Here, in the first, I show the 
nominal or political boundaries of Hungary and 
the States bordering upon it, as they have existed, 
some for fifty, some fof nearly a hundred years. 
But the whole interest of the Hungarian posi- 
tion and the whole basis of the present Russian 
effort to send raiding parties across the mountains 
*'^*'^1hlxtical boujuLiry of Hunaanan ^mtoni 
'^'ihctiur^aarum, or^^ar people 
Slav races 
Gennans 
avSMi- Roumanians 
lies in the contrast between these merely political 
boundaries and the true racial and religious boun- 
daries which define actual national feeling in this 
region. In this second sketch I have again indi- 
cated the boundaries of the difficult "mountain 
country by a single thin black line. This line 
encloses the district which is militarily an obstacle 
to the Russian advance. I have further indicated 
by a thick line the Hungarian political frontier, 
and I hav© figther. attempted to show how unreal 
that frontier is in face of the group of nationalities 
artificially enclosed within it. 
This political frontier of Hungary almob*' 
everywhere follows in the Carpathians the crest of 
the mountains, and though its trace is not exactly 
itlentical with this watershed the two sufficiently 
correspond for the purposes of such general 
remarks as these. To those unacquainted with the, 
extreme complexity of South-Eastern Europe it 
would appear, at first sight, that the boundary (so 
far as the Carpathians are concerned, at least) was 
natural. Here, one would say, is a great chain 
of heights encircling and protecting a nation 
inhabiting the plainvat their feet, and the political 
boundary corresponds with what one would expect 
to be the extent of that nationality. To such a 
first impression, which the reader might obtain 
from ordinary maps which mark only political 
boundaries, the very strongest modifications come 
in the moment one considers even language, let 
alone religion and race. 
Hungary is historically the land of the 
Magyars. The Magyar tongue is, in a peculiar 
degree, the mark of this people. It is much more 
a test of race and of the limits of the district they 
inhabit than is, for instance, the German tojiguc 
a test of German race, or even the Polish tongue 
and its allied dialects of Polish race. 
Now, the Magyar tongue, so far from follow- 
ing the boundaries of political Hungary, is re- 
stricted to no more than two much smaller areas, 
one central and westerly (relative to the wlioie 
monarchy), and grouped round the capital, Buda- 
pest; the other widely separated from it in the 
heart of the Carpathians in the extreme south-east 
of the existing Hungarian kingdom. These areas 
I have indicated roughly by diagonal hatch- 
ing. To the north the Magyars come only 
to the foot of the mountains, without pene- 
trating their valleys; to the east the same phcjio- 
menon is apparent. On the south they now' ere 
touch the political boundary of Hungary, but leave 
between that boundary and the true boundary of 
the Magyar race a wide belt of counti'y and popu- 
lation alien and often actively hostile to Mag\ ar 
influence. There is, indeed, as I have said, in the 
extreme south-east, a curious colony of Magyar 
speech and of Hungarian population, and another 
smaller colony round Kolozsvar, the chief city of 
that upland enclosed plain of Transylvania, but 
the bulk of the Magyar race lies in the western 
group round Buda-Pest. 
Here, then, we have already apparent a great 
element of complexity. What is nominally Hun- 
garian is, for a trifle more than half its population 
and much more than half its area, not Hungarian 
at all. 
This complexity becomes worse when we dis- 
cover that even those districts which are racially 
Hungarian are broken by colonies of German 
speech; islands, as it were, in the midst of the 
Magyar sea. The larger of these islands I have 
indicated by perpendicular hatching. It is, upon 
the map, exactly as though the German-speaking 
mass to the west (of which Vienna is the outpost 
and capital) had thrown out colonies towards the 
east; and, indeed, that is exactly what historically 
happened. So long as German speech represented 
Western civilisation and a united Christendom, 
and so long as the newly converted German tribes 
were acting as a bulwark against Eastern heathen- 
dom, this " colonisation " of districts, suitable to 
IQ* 
