The Slovak-Magyar Frontier
Reprinted from the “New Europe”, April 3 and 10.
The new Republic consists roughly of two halves—the lands of the Bohemian Crown and Slovakia—the latter being nearly equal in area to the former, but possessing barely a quarter of its population. In drawing the frontiers of Slovakia quite other standards must be applied from those which we have shown to be valid in the case of Bohemia. Slovakia has never formed an independent State, though in the ninth century and until the coming of the Magyars it was the center of that shortlived and loosely knit “Great Moravian Empire”, of which Svatopluk was King and the great Methodius Metropolitan. Save for an interlude during the later Hussite period of the fifteenth century, the Slovaks have remained separated from their Czech kinsmen and subjected to the heavy yoke of the Magyars who ever since the modern nationalist revival have spared no effort to denationalize the Slovaks, or where this was not possible, to foment distinctions between them and the Czechs and to foster local and particularist tendencies. It is indeed remarkable that a people whom geography and the deliberate policy of its rulers combined to isolate from the main currents of European history should none the less have proved peculiarly responsive to Slav sentiment in its widest sense, and in Kollár, Palacký, Šafařík and Masaryk should have produced four of the most eminent apostles of the Slav idea. The plain fact is that the Slovaks are one of the most gifted races in all Europe, whose natural artistic, musical and literary talent have here and there found an outlet even in the teeth of Magyar oppression, and of whom great things may fairly be expected now that the long tyranny has been shaken off.
The problem of demarcation is simplified by the fact that on the north the ethnological line of cleavage corresponds with one of the most clearly-defined natural frontiers in Europe—the mountainous barrier separating Hungary from Galicia. This will obviously remain unaltered. On the west, of course, the union wipes out the old Hungaro-Moravian boundary; but from the southernmost point of Moravia the river March again provides a natural and linguistic frontier between the Czechoslovak and German-Austrian Republics, as far as its junction with the Danube twelve miles west of Pressburg (now Bratislava). Thus the only serious difficulty is to devise a satisfactory line between the Slovaks and the Magyars.
Here, as everywhere else in Europe, the problem resolves itself into a compromise between ethnography and geography; but it is obvious that the first essential must be an attempt to get as near as possible to the true racial boundary. The main lines of such a result can be obtained from the official Magyar census figures, and it is these which we have deliberately used in the present article. It is notorious that the results which they contain are in every case unduly favorable to the Magyar element; but since 90 per cent of the essential facts can be proved out of the mouth of the enemy himself, the extreme course of rejecting all Magyar statistics as unreliable and “tendentious” would simply leave us in the position of having virtually no material whatever to work upon. Before, however, a sure and final verdict on the remaining ten per cent can be obtained, it will certainly be necessary to send an impartial international boundary commission to study conditions on the spot; and it is safe to assume that in that case the numbers of the Magyars in northern Hungary (as indeed in Transylvania and the south) will be found to have been vastly exaggerated. One simple proof of this is the fact that according to the statistics of 1910 the total number of Slovaks is given as 1,967,970, but the number of persons speaking Slovak as 2,776,743. As it is only too notorious that hardly any Magyar (even an official whose duty it is to do so) condescends to learn Slovak, the balance between these two figures must obviously consist in the main of artificially Magyarized Slovaks.
The Slovak counties fall naturally into three groups: (1) seven where the population is predominantly Slovak; (2) seven which are in great majority Slovak, but portions of which are mixed and therefore debateable; and (3) five which contain Magyar majorities, certain portions of which it will be necessary to sacrifice in
