Austria-Hungary’s Discontented Slavic Races
The Austrian Empire has not an easy time to govern its own subjects. If there is a heterogeneous mass of people in any empire on the face of the earth, unless it be the Turkish, it is in Austria-Hungary. There are Slovaks and Czechs (Bohemians) to the number of 8,574,792; Poles, 4,952,387; Ruthenians, 4,210,944; Slavonians, 1,492,709; Serbo-Croats, 6,295,912. All these are Slavs, a total population of more than twenty-five and a half million. Other races are, Germans, 11,606,722; Magyars, or Hungarians, 9,041,744; Italians less than a million; Rumanians, 3,000,000; Turks, 600,000; mixed races, 400,000; a total non-Slavic race of 25,400,000. In other words, the Slavic and non-Slavic races are about equal; and Mr. Cosulie, a Serbo-Croat of San Francisco, tells us that the Slavic races in general are not satisfied with the government of the empire. He declares that tyrannical despotism of the worst type is practised by the government against the Slavs, particularly against the Serbo-Croats, and is worse than any Russian czar, or the recently overthrown Manchus, were ever guilty of.