The Croats and Slovaks in Hungary

* Berlin, 16 February. Herr Schramm (Striegau) says in his recently published brochure: “the standpoint of democracy in and towards the octroyed second chamber”, among other things, the following:
“I have returned from Silesia and can give some useful information on the condition of the rural districts of this province. There, slander, intimidation, persecution, and bribery are organised on the most extensive scale by Prussian and veterans’ associations, by the associations for law and order, and by others of similar tendency. The political tendencies of these associations are promoted and supported by the higher and lower administrative officials, by the municipal and rural courts, by the Catholic clergy of the province, in every legally permissible and often also impermissible way. – The rural proletariat, the numerous day labourers on the large estates and dominions, stand, because of the distress of their daily meagre bread, under the sway of the estate owners, and at this year’s elections, where, unlike the previous year, the fear of immediate popular justice did not keep them within bounds, the estate owners have made the most shameless use of this power, and will continue to do so, unless energetic penal provisions are enacted against it.”
“On the estates there lives, apart from the actual servants, a very large number of day labourers who, on extremely scanty wages, in most cases insufficient for an adequate livelihood, live from hand to mouth, and who, especially in the season when field work is wanting, have to obtain provisions on credit from the estate owner, in order to work off the purchase price of the same in spring and summer. – They are unable to free themselves from this relationship of dependency without state aid, because the whole landed property has been in fixed hands from time immemorial, and nobody sells or leases land in parcels. They are also still today, as they were fifty years ago, excluded from the extensive state domains which, in very many districts, would suffice for their relief if leased out in parcels. It seems that their condition of dependency, after having been legally abolished, is to be preserved in fact, so that the authority of the estate owners may remain unimpaired and the wages of field labour may not rise for them.”
“From these oppressed people, who have, however, matured into citizenship under the pressure, the estate owners, almost without exception, as if on the basis of a conspiracy, have extorted the votes for the elections of electors by means of public, very seriously meant threats of immediate expulsion from work, of immediate executive enforcement of the food debts; and many a one will rise in the Chamber as a gentle philanthropist who owes his seat only to these extortions. They form, for those who practised them, an evil and dangerous seed, which may and will perhaps bear evil fruit in later times; but for the time being it flourishes unchecked. For the time being, until the pitcher breaks, the same coercion of conscience can be repeated at every new election, both for the state and for the municipality, at every address or petition requiring support through the number of signatures, and it will be repeated.”