have been close to the situation over there. We are Americans because of destiny through the force of conditions, economic, if you please, the love of freedom. That has brought us over here. Thank God the time has come when the situation over there, because of that tremendous flood in the progress of history, has simply wiped out the old order and has set up a new condition of affairs. The treasure that we have spent, the lives of our brave soldiers that we have sacrificed-all these tremendous sacrifices will have been in vain, if you gentlemen through your action here do anything which will seek to restore that old order of things, which made that economic, that political slavery over there possible. I know that you are in consonance with the spirit of the American people, and that you fully appreciate the sacrifices that have been made by not only our brave men, but by those other brave men who have, in the face of great opposition, in the face of great dangers, proudly walked to the gallows, who have proudly stood up against a wall to be shot down as traitors-not as traitors, but as defenders of the cause which represented the liberty and the brighter future of their people. Senator HARDING. And you found under existing conditions here the greater opportunity for which you came?

Mr. SVARC. Oh, I was born here.

Senator HARDING. Can you speak for those who came?

Mr. SVARC. I have been on the other side, so that I know of that greater opportunity.

Senator HARDING. That is all.

Senator KNOX. I understand you to say that you are a nativeborn American citizen?

Mr. SVARC. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. That is all. We thank you.

(The advertisement referred to is here printed in the record in full, as follows:)

[From The World, Sunday, August 10, 1919.]

TO THE AMERICAN NATION-REAL FACTS ABOUT HUNGARY.

The Hungarian situation has reached a stage of such acuteness that the peace conference and the home Governments of the principal Allies as well are greatly disturbed. Ultimatums, hurriedly telegraphed to Roumanía, demanding a modification of the severe terms imposed on the Hungarians have proved futile.

Because of the obdurate attitude of the Roumanians, the transportation system of central Europe has been upset, making it impossible to forward supplies to the starving populations.

Mr. Balfour, the Foreign Secretary of England, in the strongest possible terms, condemned the Roumanian invasion of Hungary's capital and, according to cable dispatches, the peace conference unanimously demanded the withdrawal of the Roumanian troops from Budapest and did not recognize Roumania's ultimatum to Hungary.

And now that it has been so fatefully demonstrated that an ally of the allies may commit deeds that are wrong, the "American Committee for the Relief of Hungary" would like to state a few facts which will show that the demands of Hungary's neighbors for territory are wrong as well, and while based upon racial grounds, are clearly imperialistic.

The American people had so little opportunity to hear Hungary's side of the story that this information should be welcomed by every fair-minded citizen of this country.

To begin with, thousand-year-old Hungary has been in the course of its his tory a great power for good. The constitution of Hungary is as old as its history. Next to the English, the Hungarian constitution is the oldest in

Europe. Then it must be remembered that Hungary has always been the classical land of religious liberty. As far back as 1554 the Transylvanian Diet at Torda enacted the legal equality of all denominations then known there. That Hungary for a century and a half has been fighting the Turks and preventing them from extending their rule over western Europe is a known historical fact. Hungarian music, Hungarian literature and art, as well as Hungarian scholarship, have contributed to a large extent to the world's knowledge, enjoyment, and enlightenment. Hungarian culture has an individuality all of its own. Shall it cease now? Shall Hungary be dismembered, vivisected, annihilated?

The neighboring nations want to dismember Hungary on racial grounds, but what are the facts?

Thousand-year-old Hungary does not possess any provinces conquered by the sword. Her frontiers have not changed for ten centuries. The country is inhabited by Hungarians or Magyars, who established themselves there in the ninth century, and by other races which immigrated there in later times. Most of the Germans immigrated as colonists. In the eleventh century the ancestors of the Slovaks of today were admitted from the upper valleys of the Morava, Oder, and Vistula. In the fourteenth century Ruthenians made a habit of crossing the mountains in the northeast to pasture their cattle in those tracts of the country. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Hungarians permitted Roumanian shepherds from Wallacha and Bulgaria to settle in the southern parts of Hungary. The number of the Roumanians and Serbians increased when many thousands of those races came to Hungary in order to find there an asylum where they would be safe from Turkish rule. The Hungarians welcomed them and made them feel at home in their country.

It is, therefore, an outstanding historical fact that those parts of Hungary which to-day are inhabited by various nationalities did not belong originally to those races, but have been populated by the ancestors of the Slovaks, Ruthenians, Roumanians, Serbians, and Germans through immigration.

The other outstanding fact is that not only has Hungary within her present limits been a political unit for more than a thousand years, but her territory is perhaps the finest natural geographic unity in Europe, as a glimpse at the map will show. Economically her parts are interdependent, northern Hungary having iron, wood, water power; central and western Hungary having wheat, corn, pasture grounds; southeastern Hungary (Transylvania), coal, salt, oil, and natural gas. Each section apparently is-economically speakinga cripple; together they constitute a fine, self-supporting organism. Belonging to the same river system, they communicate easily with each other. History has been the interpreter of nature when she created and preserved the political union of Hungary's present territory.

Life and time mingled the various races in Hungary incessantly. Other minglings were accentuated during the eighteenth century, and as one finds them now side by side, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and orthodox, similarly there are in Hungary in the same region members of five or six nationalities. If we except central Hungary, which is wholly Magyar (85 per cent), and northern Hungary, which is indeed almost entirely Slovak (76 per cent), the races are so intermingled that you can not cut out an unbroken territory from any of them. Every such attempt creates new mixed territories with no clear racial majority in them.

A fair solution of the problem in Hungary, therefore, must be one which conciliates the laws of geography and political economy and the deep rooted result of history with the just demand of race.

Of course imperialism manufactures its own apparently just reasons to explain its unprincipled pretensions. Hungary's neighbors claim that the nationalities in Hungary have been oppressed. There is no space available to refute here this accusation. But what sort of an oppression could it have been that made it possible for all these races to increase in numbers to keep their language and national individuality during seven or eight centuries? Does this fact not show rather that Magyar rule was not only not oppressive but, on the contrary, liberal and generous? Other countries in Europe have during the past centuries forced their population of many races to melt together and become one nation. Hungary permitted all of its inhabitants to keep their nationality, asking them only to be good Hungarian citizens.

And the majority of these nationalities-the Slovaks, the Roumanians, the Serbs do not want to cease to be Hungarian. It is the land-owner of the neighboring nations, their imperialism, which urges not only the dismember

ment of Hungary, but demands territories where the Magyar race is in majority on the ground that some of their own nationality live there, thereby intending to subject millions of Hungarians to foreign rule.

Now, Hungary's problem, if a lasting peace is intended, can be solved only in accordance with the principle of national self-determination. It would violate this principle to permit that territories should be shifted from one State into another without the consent of the people who live upon those territories.

Indeed, the dismemberment of Hungary would be as great an injustice as that of Poland was, and would be a cause of economic troubles and never ceasing hostilities. It would create a Magyar Irridentism much worse than any irridentism known heretofore, because the oppression and subjugation of the Magyar people would take place at the very time when justice to the nationalities has been recognized a fundamental principle of world politics.

We respectfully appeal, therefore, to the President of the United States, to the United States Senate, to the House of Representatives, and to the American Nation for justice to Hungary.

AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR THE RELIEF OF HUNGARY,
BERTALAN BARNA,

665 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY.

Chairman. ARNOLD SOMLYO, Corresponding Secretary.

STATEMENT OF MR. 0. D. KOREFF.

Mr. KOREFF. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I shall be very brief.

Senator POMERENE. Mr. Koreff, where are you from?

Mr. KOREFF. I am from Pittsburgh, Pa.

The same Magyars who came here yesterday to plead for the integrity of Hungary are the Magyars who until recently were members of the Middle European Plunderbund. The peace conference at Versailles compelled them to disgorge the subjugated races, to wit: The Slovaks, the Serbians, and the Roumanians. Twice they conspired against the safety of the civilized world. First, when their Premier Tisza pushed the hand of Vienna, and by this action started the great European conflagration which even reached the shores of this country and necessitated American intervention in Europe. The second time, when Count Michael Karolyi, seeing that the Allies and the United States stood firmly on the principle of self-determination for these subjugated races of Hungary, turned Hungary over to the forces of anarchy in order to scare civilization into concessions to the real political factor, to the only potent factor in Magyar politics, the Magyar feudal nobility of Hungary. They are the only ones interested in the integrity of Hungary. Eleven millions of nonMagyars are not.

The Magyars are basing their claims on their so-called historical rights, yet the most noted Magyar historians have discarded these historical claims as belonging into the realm of fables. But even if their historical rights were of a stronger fiber they could not strengthen their case materially. Historical rights of nations are only valid as long as they don't interfere with the natural rights of others. Our own Declaration of Independence defines these natural rights very clearly: "We hold these truths to be self-evident— that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, govern

ments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." From the standpoint of historical right, England's claim to the colonies would still be valid had not the supreme will of the colonists established a natural right for the United States to be free. And so it is with the Slovaks of Hungary, who sought and found incorporation in the Czecho-Slovak Republic. The right of the Slovaks is not only based on their right as autochthons, as aborigines, who occupied their present location since time immemorial, long before the first Magyar ever set foot on the soil of present Hungary. It is based on the principle of self-determination which entitles ipso facto 76.5 per cent of the Slovak population of Slovakia, or, as the Magyars call it, Northern Hungary, to declare themselves free and seek their natural affiliation with their racial brethren, the Czechs of Bohemia. But the Magyars purposely confuse the rights of a citizen with the obligations of a subject.

Among the Magyars themselves there are two groups as regards their history. One group still clings to the unreliable history of the anonymous notary of King Bela, while another group, the NeoMagyars, has thrown all these makeshift "emergency" stories into discard and has tried to rebuild its history on the result of the research work undertaken by the Oriental Academy founded in 1830 by Count Szechenyi. Modern Magyar historians are discarding the fable of Arpad and his conquest of Hungary as one of the many inexplicable things in their history. The main reason is that it never happened. Another reason is that of the original Magyars, who helped the Germans to down the Greater Moravian Principality at the end of the ninth century, no more are left, and that the present Magyars are not descendants of these Magyars of the ninth century, but descendants of the tribe of the Kumany who came into Hungary at the end of the twelfth century. Vambery, one of their most noted historians, traces these Kumany into Asia Minor, near the Caspian Sea. They belong to the Ugro-Turanian race. These Kumany are very much like the Magyars in physical appearance and other common characteristics. Vambery found among them many "arpads." which means in their language "leader," and there is no doubt that some "arpad" led them from Asia to Europe. They were nomads, wandering from place to place with their herds of cattle in search of grazing grounds. It is improbable that they entered Hungary by the northern entrance, through the Carpathian Mountains. Such entrance would have been too cumbersome for wagons and cattle. On the other hand, it is almost certain that they followed the upstream route of the Danube River, grazing along until they reached the plains of present Hungary. These being unoccupied there was nobody to resist them, and thus they took possession of the country.

There never was any dispute as to the Magyars having been nomads. The dispute begins where their historians of the old school try to convince the student of history that the Magyars came into Hungary at the end of the ninth century, settled down after conquering the country, and gave it immediately a constitution. There

seems to be no question whence a nation, or a tribe, without any fixed domicile, gets the idea of constitutional rights and constitutional government. But it is a fact that the Magyars took over from the Slovaks their form of county government, which, to the present date, probably slightly altered, forms the spinal column of the Magyar State.

Magyar history originated when the question of a written history became a burning necessity for a nation which yet had to explain how it happened to get to Europe. Thus their history turned out to be a makeshift without either archæological or ethnographical foundation. In the brief presented yesterday by the representatives of the "Hungarian-American Federation "there are some very weighty contradictions. Where Mr. Pivany stated that "the Bohemians, or Czechs, have made some allusions to the semimythical Moravian Empire of Svatopluk, which is alleged to have extended over parts of northern Hungary and been disrupted by the incursion of the Hungarians in the ninth century, the Slovaks, it is alleged, are the descendants of Svatopluk's Moravians;" Dr. Sekely admits that "there were only a few Slovaks," two contradictory statements, both in the same brief. How serious can such statements be taken?

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I could go on a great deal longer, but I shall refrain from anything further that I have to say to the brief which you have so very kindly said you would permit us to file. We thank you very much for the opportunity to be heard. The CHAIRMAN. You may file your briefs with the reporter.

(The briefs referred to were subsequently submitted and are here printed in full as follows:)

To the SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE:

May it please you, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of this committee, Mr. Ven Svare, of Cleveland, Ohio, an American by birth, of Czech descent, a lawyer by profession; Mr. O. D. Koreff of Pittsburg, an American citizen of Czech birth, a newspaper editor: and myself, an American citizen of Slovak birth, represent the Slovak League of America and the Bohemian National Alliance, which have branch organizations in more than one-half of the States of the United States.

At this time I desire to thank this committee for the privilege it has extended to us in granting us an opportunity to be heard and present to you the case of CzechoSlovakia in so far as it relates to the Magyar Government. Our purpose in view in appearing before you is to cooperate with your committee and assist you in reaching a judicious settlement in the matter entitled "The Case of Hungary," and further to refute and correct the vicious and misleading statements propounded by the representatives of the Magyar people who appeared yesterday before your honorable body. I shall be very brief and dwell with the Czecho-Slovak and Magyar situation in the United States and leave the economical, geographical, and historical questions affecting the Czecho-Slovak and Magyar situation to my colleagues.

I believe that you ought to know something about the Czecho-Slovak people in the United States. The Czecho-Slovaks began to immigrate into the United States befor the Civil War and many of them fought bravely and heroically in that war. These Czecho-Slovaks began to immigrate to our shores in large numbers principally to escape the hardships and cruelties perpetrated upon them by the Magyar and Austrian Governments and to escape military service, realizing the humiliation and the insults that would be heaped upon them and the treatment accorded them by the Magyar and Austrian militaristic lords.

Since the presentation of the Magyar case involves Slovakia more vitally than it does the Czechs, I shall confine myself more to the Slovak people in this country, a subject with which I am more familiar, having been intimately connected with them for many years in various matters and being a Slovak by birth.