The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF

Croatia. Their plan, however, was frustrated by the vigilance of Vienna, and both were beheaded in Vienna in 1671. Henceforward Croatia was ruled directly from Vienna as a mere Austrian Crown-land. But the memory of Zrinski and Frankopan lived for ever in the hearts of their compatriots, who venerated them as heroes and martyrs for national freedom and independence.

As long as the Latin tongue was the official language of the whole kingdom of Hungary the Croats, being faithful children of the Roman Catholic Church, had little reason to complain. But the germanising tendency of the Emperor Joseph II, which awakened the national feelings of the Magyars, also exercised a strong influence upon the slumbering feelings of the Croats. The Magyars were always of the opinion that the right to national independence and development, which they claimed so strongly themselves, could never be shared by the other races of Hungary. The first acts of their independence have always been the forcible magyarisation of the Serbo-Croats, Roumanians and Slovaks, and the refusal of their national demands. This spirit of national intolerance of the Magyars towards other races is greatly and directly responsible for the terrible crisis into which Europe has been plunged in our own day.

Thus at the time of the Magyar Assembly, held at Pressburg in 1825 under the influence of young Kossuth and Count Seezegny, when the Magyars

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