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No. 4. | Vienna, 23 January 1903 — 24 Tebeth 5663. | 7th Year

A Text-book Case.

Our domestic politicians have long been promising us the reawakening of the Liberal spirit. Just now would be the best opportunity for it to come to us; for it has just departed from Hungary. Not even the most modest of expectations can find anything liberal in the bill which a few days ago became law in the Hungarian Chamber of Deputies, and which reads: "Whoever wishes to settle in Hungary must report his intention within 15 days of his arrival, must produce documents as to his identity, nationality and previous moral conduct, and must in every case prove, by showing his means, that he is able to support himself and his family permanently. If he cannot do so, or 'if his residence appears a danger to public order and security,' he may be expelled by the police without further ado, even after he has settled."

The list of speakers on this bill already showed us whom it concerns — the Antisemites spoke, and one Jew — even had the Prime Minister not said: "The effect of this bill is directed against the influx of certain Galician and Russian elements, vagrant in the north-eastern part of Hungary and still regarded as foreign and alien, not because they are Jews, but because they do not belong here, because in the economic, social and national life they are suspect elements which must be thrust out." The Prime Minister who said this is named not Stourdza but Széll. In the same breath he gave the Jews of Hungary the reassuring pledge that all patriotic Hungarians of every faith were still fellow-citizens. Those were golden words — in their effect; one need only think of the Hungarian government party's next election expenses. And why should it not throw a liberal morsel to its ever-faithful political house-Jews, those champions of Magyarisation so bitterly hated by the non-Magyars, those willing payers with their rabbis in attila and czismen?

The Premier of the "chivalrous nation" spoke neither wittily nor bravely when he imputed unprovable qualities to the fugitives from the Jewish famine district. In England and America, where these unfortunates have long been known, they have received from eminent men the best testimonials to their civic qualities. At the regulation of the Danube at Vienna, on the tug-boats of Havre, in the mines of Canada, they earn their bread panting but content. Their peculiar danger to Hungary is likely to be the danger they pose to the nerves of the Prime Minister, who in every sentence of his non-binding speech emphasised his liberalism, and in every sentence of the legally binding bill refuted it.

The debate took the time-honoured course of the exchanges upon Antisemitism. For the Antisemites — a Hungarian rival product, fully the equal of every foreign article — no degree of hostility to the Jews was enough; the one Jew who had not been struck speechless, Visontai, made himself contemptible, as most liberal Jews do. He partly concedes the justification of Antisemitism, repudiates all community with those affected, and points to the fine Jews whom he would have exempted. Visontai, too, described the Jewish immigrants as morally inferior! It would be very interesting to learn when and how the honourable gentleman himself came to Hungary!?

Visontai's interpellation on the Roumanian Jews, announced with pomp by every newspaper, has met with a surprising answer. He interpellates the Government for intervention in Roumania with a view to the toleration of the Jews, but has the effrontery to cite as his ground the injury done to security in Hungary by the fugitives. And now Széll destroys the last conclusion of the wisdom of the assimilationists, who long for State intervention on behalf of the Roumanian Jews: Roumania, says the speaker, has not resisted the Treaty of Berlin but has accommodated herself to it. In any case he would not interfere in an internal affair of that country. He could, however, set the interpellant's mind at rest, for the An-