Paris Peace Conf. 184.01102/19
Professor A. C. Coolidge to the Commission to Negotiate Peace
[Received January 28.]
Sirs: I have the honor to report that the point that all Hungarians dwell upon with passionate insistence is the essential unity of their country, despite the various nationalities that inhabit it. I shall present here some of their chief historical and national arguments.
[Page 376]No country in Europe has been more genuinely and historically united for the last thousand years than has Hungary. Her boundaries have been so well marked out by nature that except for the period when the greater part of her territory had been conquered by the Turks her frontiers have changed but little since the days when the Magyars first entered into this land. The only considerable accretion has been Croatia and Slavonia, whose union has never been complete and whose separation is now accepted.
The Hungarian State has had a long, and in many respects a glorious, history, with the usual variations of prosperity and decay, but always with a lively sense of its national existence. In the age when most of Hungary was in the hands of the Turks, Hungarian national life took refuge in portions of their land under Hapsburg rule or under that of the semi-independent Hungarian princes of Transylvania. It is to be noted that precisely these territories in the west, north and east, dear to Hungarian traditions, are the ones where the non-Magyar nationalities predominate in numbers. There is much dispute as to whether the Rumanians are the older or the late comers in Transylvania. The Germans mostly settled at various times in the middle ages. The mixed populations, Germans, Serbs, Rumanians, etc. in the Banat of Temesvar were welcomed in the 18th Century by the Hapsburg sovereigns as immigrants into a region which had formerly been Magyar and most of whose population had disappeared under Turkish rule. Just as the fact that there are Alsatians, Bretons, Basques and other elements who do not speak French does not impair the recognized unity of France, so the Hungarians feel that their unity of a thousand years is not affected by the existence within their borders of people who do not in ordinary life make use of the national language. That the land should now be partitioned after the fashion of Poland seems so incredible to them that many even now cannot realize it is possible. They declare that, however unable to resist at the present moment, the Hungarians will never submit to being permanently divided up among neighboring states, leaving them but a helpless fragment of territory, one incapable of economic existence. If the boundaries of Hungary in the future should correspond to the present lines of foreign occupation which are continually being changed to her disadvantage, she would be left with 31 percent, of her previous extent and less than 40 percent, of her previous population. 34 percent, of the Magyars of today, or more than three and three quarters millions of people, would be subjected to foreign rule. I inclose an estimate with these figures which has been given to me.75 This population, a proud, determined and enduring one, thus subjected to nationalities whom it has for centuries regarded as inferior to itself would constitute a number of Irredentas which could not be absorbed [Page 377] in any time that it is now possible to foresee. One Hungarian statesman and former prime minister put it to me thus: “It looks as if the policy of the Allies was to create at the same time an Ulster (the Szeckler region in Transylvania) and an Alsace-Lorraine (the Magyar speaking regions now occupied by the Czechs) in this part of the world.” To compel what has been since a thousand years a unified country to accept such an arrangement as permanent would only condemn it to a future of hatred and strife with every probability of violent outbreak before many years have elapsed.
In other dispatches I shall take up the questions of the geographical unity of Hungary and of the separate disputes as to nationality.
I have [etc.]
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