"Hold fast to Sophia, all of you, and look upon her as your mother. Be obedient to God, and humble with every man. Take counsel on the subject of my fortune, which I leave in the greatest disorder, in order that you may have the means of completing your education. There are many good men, who, for the sake of your father, will counsel, and help you.

"To my kin in Kleinschalken, Mediasch, and Holdvilag, I send thanks in my last moments for all they have done to me, and may yet do for my children; and my housekeeper will do me a favour, if she remain until my household get into some order, and each of my chickens under some wing.

"The Hungarian foundling, the education of which I have undertaken, I wish to have continued, unless its parents should appear to claim it. Of the children of my church in Meschen, I think with love. May they be enriched with the fruits of godliness. I have sown but little seed, and done too little for their spiritual culture. May the Almighty make the harvest richer! I have preached

love and virtue: may my death give a greater value to the word I have spoken.

"Farewell, dear people!

"I have meant well for my nation, without seeking the evil of other nations. My functions in Elizabethstadt and Kokelburg have been performed in obedience to superior will, which has brought me to death. Of any crime I am unconscious; mistakes I may have made, but no injustice have I done; and it rejoices me in my last moments, to think that I have protected the property of the landed aristocracy to the best of my power.

"In my desk are my programmes of the Educational and Ecclesiastical Journal.

"The national body is shattered, and I believe in no future re-composition of its limbs. I therefore so much the more wish for the preservation of the Spirit that dwelt in these forms; and I beg my remaining brethren to carry out this Journal, in order to maintain purity of manners

and honesty of intention in the people. If we are doomed to fall, let it be in such a way that our children will not be ashamed of their fathers. Time presses-I beg pardon of all whom I have offended, and leave the world, praying to God to pardon my enemies."

The letter concludes with some minor dispositions, and is signed, "In the name of God, Stephen Ludwig Roth, Evangelical (i. e. Lutheran) Pastor in Meschen,” and is followed by a postscript, which runs thus:

"I must, in conclusion, say, that neither in life nor in death have I been the enemy of the Magyar nation. May they believe this as the words of a dying man, at a moment when hypocrisy is useless."

"It was on this very spot," said the Saxon pastor to me, "that Roth stopped to take breath as I accompanied him, and gave him spiritual consolation in his last moments; and being the month of May, the foliage had just come out. The world is beautiful,' said he, as he looked round the valley; but let my humanity stand confessed-how much more beautiful when one sees it for the last time;' and within a few minutes, Roth was shot on the ramparts."

Let me now bid adieu to Transylvania, that fair and unhappy land, which has my warmest wishes for its prosperity, and collect a few of the ideas which remain after the precipitation of the mud of minor details; for the question of Hungary is a much clearer one than that of Transylvania, the difficulties of which are so great as to puzzle the ablest head; therefore, the suggestions which I offer for the re-construction of order in this principality, are made with a diffidence in the soundness of my own proposals, which must be felt by every traveller who has gone through this hot-bed of national fanaticism.

Austria must return to her natural political condition, which, like that of her geographical situation, lies between the absolutism of Russia and the democracy of France. With these masses of semi-barbarous population, unfit for

PATON. II.

9

the exercise of the functions of constitutional citizenship, I do not think (however desirable it may be) that it is possible for Transylvania, for generations to come, to enjoy anything like a British system of liberty. But if, on the other hand, Hungary should become a larger Poland, the Austrian monarchy becomes a stifled volcano.

I begin with the region of the Szeklers, which is tolerably compact, and, therefore, offers less difficulties, as this people is less scattered among the others. They have a strong feeling of nationality, but are, although laborious and persevering, less honest and more calculating than the Magyars. Provided, therefore, they get their salt cheap, and be materially comfortable, it will not be so easy to gain them to the cause of the revolution.

As regards nationality, the Szeklers live in so compact a mass, that there is no possibility of a German colonisation of this territory. The interests of government would, therefore, be much better served by the exclusive employment of loyal and well-disposed Magyars and Szeklers, of whom, I maintain, with proper management, there would be no lack in Transylvania. The hands of the Kossuth party having been principally strengthened by the massacres of the Daco-Romans, which drove many well-disposed persons to support the revolutionary government, in spite of their own antipathy to republican tendencies. The Szekler-land would, therefore, be most useful to Austria, by a free development of its nationality, and a very light direct taxation, on condition of their furnishing, in return, a large number of recruits, which, with proper discipline, make the best troops imaginable, when away from home.

The Saxon land offers, also, less difficulties, by a simple adherence to their ancient municipal system, within the ancient limits; and, if allowed to manage their own affairs in their own way, will, probably, prove far more loyal and pliable subjects of the house of Austria, than if knitted to her by bureaucratic centralisation. They certainly cannot

be more loyal than they were during the late struggle. Their loyalty, under the municipal system, is an undoubted historical fact. The continuance of this feeling, under the system of centralisation, is an experiment of which, if tried, time alone will show the result.

I now come to a far more difficult subject, the relations of Magyars and Daco-Romans, in the central and eastern parts of Transylvania, in which the great questions of protection of property and justice to nationality, have been complicated. The Daco-Romans not only claim the supremacy of their language, grounded on the supremacy of their numbers, but are most deeply infected with a desire to retain possession of the allodial lands and forests which afford the principal revenue in many parts of a wooded and mountainous country. An effective protection of the landed proprietor, in his capacity as proprietor, supreme over his land, but not in his character of Magyar supreme over the Daco-Roman,-is requisite under the new system. He possesses the right to enjoy, to the last kreutzer, the product of such and such land; but when the Daco-Roman population is so large, it is clear that, after such a revolution, the restoration of the supremacy of the Magyar language and nationality would be neither prudent nor just. Land is the right of a few; but nationality is the right of the many; and the official language ought, clearly, to be that of the people, rather than that of the aristocracy. The establishment of this principle, so far from being an infringement of Magyar nationality, indirectly assumes the injustice of ruling the Magyar districts of Hungary through any other medium than the Magyar language. The official language, therefore, of the greater part of Transylvania ought to be Daco-Roman, which every Magyar landed proprietor speaks fluently, and can also write, if the Roman letters be used instead of Cyrillian, which certainly ought to be the case with a Latin dialect.

The solution of this difficult problem seems, therefore, to me to lie in a distinction of the just claims and unjust

pretensions of both parties in the protection of the Magyars in their lands from Daco-Roman invasion, and in the protection of the Daco-Romans, in their language, from ultra-Magyar invasion.

CHAPTER XIX.

GROSSWARDEIN-THE DEFILE OF CSUCSA-INTENSE COLDDESCRIPTION OF GROSSWARDEIN-CARNIVAL BALL-LIBERTY AND NATIONALITY-THE MAGYAR ARSENAL-COLONISATION OF HUNGARY.

I now left Transylvania and took the diligence to Grosswardein in Hungary, the nearest large town on the other side of the frontier, and important not only on account of its having been the arsenal of the Magyar army during the late struggle, but from being at the present time the capital of the largest civil and military province in Hungary under the new organisation.

The weather was intensely cold, and the diligence, rather a sort of Irish car, protected from the weather by leather curtains, and as the thermometer fell to twenty-four degrees Reaumur, the reader may imagine that a passage through the defiles of Csucsa was anything but pleasant. I slept a considerable part of the time almost unconscious of the possession of limbs, and the journey seemed like a dream, presenting a confused recollection of steep hills overhanging a frozen river and endless forests of pines candied with snow, half melted and bound with frost again. As we came to a village, an old Magyar fellow-traveller called my attention to it, and to the Daco-Romans, shivering about, even in their sheep-skins, and I again fell asleep, after he had told me a frightful story of the bride to whom he was about to be married having been murdered in this neighbourhood.