DEBATED FRONTIERS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23149, 22 September 1938, Page 13

DEBATED FRONTIERS

POLES' AND MAGYAES

PROBLEM OF MIXED RACES HUNGARIAN REVISIONISTS LANDOWNERS' HOSTILITY The attitude of the Polish semiofficial press since the Austrian union with Germany has been to work for the break-up of Czechoslovakia, by incessant pressure from inside, so that the territorial gains of Poland and her Hungarian friends would at least offset Germany's gain through the acquisition of the Sudeten districts, wrote a correspondent of the Times recently. Much has been said and written in recent years about the grievances of the small Polish minority in the Teschen district of Czechoslovakia, and of the unfriendly attitude of the leaders of Czechoslovakia . toward Poland throughout most of the last 20 years. There is no doubt that much of this has a substantial basis in fact, but it seems none the less true that Poland's attitude toward the Czechoslovak problem is based on considerations of "Realpolitik" rather than on minority grievances and personal dislikes. Heterogeneous Population One writer has pointed out that Poland itself is almost as heterogeneous as Czechoslovakia. The population is over 34,000,000. Of this number 22,000,000 or 69 per cent speak Polish, 3,250,000 speak TJkranian, nearly 3,000,000 speak Yiddish or Hebrew, 1,250,000 speak Ruthenian, 750,000 speak German and about 1,000,000 speak Russian and other languages. The census of 1930 gave 691,923 as the total of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia. President Masaryk himself believed in a rectification of the Hungarian frontier to dispose of this Magyar minority. Magyar revisionists, however, have also laid claim to the non-Maeyar provinces of pre-war Hungary. They have demanded the return of the whole of Slovakia and Ruthenia. Thus they have been regarded with suspicion and what might have been considered a just claim has received no consideration.

Disgruntled Classes Seventy per cent of the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia are peasants and although some of them resented the settling of Czechoslovak legionaries in five villages in their midst at the end of the war, most of them have some Land and prices for agricultural products lyive been good on the whole. The landless peasants in Hungary itself are said to be in a more revolutionary 6tate of mind. The most hostile of the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia to the Government of the republic are the few big land-' owners, whose land was redistributed under the agrarian reform law. They received some compensation, but they have never condoned the reversal of the feudal order of things. The professional classes are also disgruntled. They have been adversely affected by the , change in the official language and toy the transformation of the one university in Slovakia from a Hungarian into a Slovakian institution. "Though about 60 per cent of the Hungarian minority votes for the Opposition cause," says a commentator, "it contains no revolutionary material that is not imported."