Nicholas T. Parsons

Custodians of the Future

Scottish and English Influences on Hungary in the Reform Age

NOTES

Steamboats cannot stand the smell of feudalism”,1 wrote Count István Széchenyi in his diary on August 1st, 1830. On that day Széchenyi had observed a team of sweating labourers hauling a boat round one of the infamous Danube “reaches”, men who were treated little better than the “half-wild” horses often employed for the same job. A large number of haulers was required, but labour was cheap: the muscle-power was recompensed with the equivalent of a few pence a day, or no wage at all if conditions were too bad to proceed. One year later, the first steamship (with engines supplied by Messrs Boulton & Watt) was put into service on the Danube—doubtless the same boat, with its morose and supercilious English captain, on which one Michael Joseph Quin was to travel in 1835.2 Quin not only gives a vivid description of steam travel in its infancy, but also notes that the Hungarian Diet, after long deliberation, had just passed a resolution instituting a toll for the projected bridge between Pest and Buda. “Slight as this incident may seem to an Englishman,” he remarks rather self-righteously, “it will probably lead the way to many useful reforms (in Hungary), on account of the principle of equal taxation which it involves”. The new possibilities of progress down and progress across the Danube were, as Quin accurately perceived, harbingers of something far greater than mere convenience of movement: they heralded the protracted birth of a civil society that was also to be a national rebirth.

Confronting industrialization

Széchenyi, for his part, instinctively realized that steam power, with its enormous potential for increasing production and mobility, both symbolized and embodied the nexus between economic progress and social transformation. England itself stood on the threshold of the railway age, which was also to be the age of the Great Reform Bill. The poet William Wordsworth, by this stage of his life a romantic reactionary, disapproved of both: of railways because they encouraged an unreflective rushing about which was decivilizing, and of the Reform Bill because he thought it weakened a time-honoured framework of social cohesion and opened the way to demagoguery. Over thirty years later, the novelist William Thackeray ironically looked back on the coming of the railway, writing in the Cornhill Magazine: “We are of the time of chivalry as well as the Black Prince… we are of the age of steam. We have stepped out of the old world on to Brunel’s vast deck, and across the waters ingens patet telius. Towards what new continent are we wending? To what new laws, new manners, new politics, vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised… We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world are like Father Noah and his family out of the ark.”3 These perceptions, albeit jocularly expressed, were also an intimation of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter was later to describe as the “creative destruction” inherent in the new order of rampant capitalism, a force to which few corners of Europe were to remain invulnerable.
As Széchenyi well knew, modernization and what we now refer to as “technology transfer” had enormous—and not always happy—implications for its beneficiaries. Above all, it had implications for the old order of society, as Samuel Smiles, that complacent apologist for progress and bourgeois values, made clear in his life of the railway engineer, George Stephenson. ”It was some time,” he wrote drily, “…before the more opulent classes, who could afford to post to town in aristocratic style, became reconciled to railway travelling. The old families did not relish the idea of being conveyed in a train of passengers of all ranks and conditions, in which the shopkeeper and the peasant were carried along at the same speed as the duke and the baron—the only difference being in price. It was another deplorable illustration of the levelling tendencies of the age.”4 Such attitudes may have been typical of a reactionary British élite, but it is interesting to see the specifically Magyar spin put on them by a visiting Hungarian, Ferenc Pulszky, as he contemplated the democratic fall-out (and financial excesses) of the first railway boom on his visit to England in 1836. In his diary he wrote of his fears that “the age of the railway may also become the age of superficiality, and that instead of love of the fatherland, there will be a levelling cosmopolitanism.” He found much to admire in Britain—more than he expected, given the preconceptions with which he arrived, fully expecting to be confronted with a land where “utilitarianism rules”, one far too like America, which he calls “the fatherland of egoism… a republic on Bentham’s model where the spirit is oppressed, life loses its greatest charm, its shining colours, and everything ends in surfeit.” While he admires London (but chiefly because of its green parks with cattle grazing in them), Manchester is “wreathed in thick factory smoke, like a city on fire, the sparsely windowed houses depressing, anything more noble extinguished by the oppression of the steam machines”; in the city’s spinning factories, these machines “all but made workmen dispensable.”5 This is the sceptical spirit to be found also in the attitudes of Lajos Kossuth, and powerfully expressed in his speech to the new Hungarian Parliament in February 1848: Hungary, he says (quoting Isaac Newton), should “emulate the dwarf that grows taller and sees further than the giant himself on whose shoulder he has climbed … our nation—though backward—may profit from the experiences of other nations; let us avoid following them in everything, and endeavour to avoid their mistakes.”6
In Britain, concern about the social consequences of the industrial revolution were expressed both on the left and the right of politics (by the Chartists on behalf of the exploited workers, by a conservative radical like William Cobbett who lamented the despoliation of England, the growth of cities at the expense of the countryside and the materialistic greed of the new rich).
Likewise in feudal Hungary, the obiter dicta of the two towering figures in the politics of the Reform Age, Count István Széchenyi and Lajos Kossuth, demonstrate the extent to which both were aware of the social costs involved in the modernization process. In particular they were sensitive to the obliteration of the personal ties characteristic of feudalism and their substitution by the anonymity and anomie engendered by systems of greater economic efficiency. After all, children working down the mines was hardly a humanitarian improvement on the feudal exploitation of labourers. Nevertheless, there are clear distinctions in the attitudes of the two men, distinctions that ultimately led not only to them proposing markedly different solutions to Hungary’s problems, but also to an irreversible personal split between them, which highlighted the historically grounded dilemma in which Hungary found itself at this time.
When Széchenyi visited England for the first time in 1815, his letters to Count Zichy brimmed with enthusiasm for new technologies. “He visited workshops and factories,” writes his biographer, George Barany, “and was fascinated by steam engines, gas pipelines, sawmills, sausage-cutting gadgets and the ‘extraordinary’ sight of forty workers producing 500 pairs of shoes a day.” Yet almost in the same breath he remarks somewhat naively that steam power could not compete with cheap labour in backward countries like Hungary, and that Hungarians were a “warlike nation… of innate ferocity, unlikely to adjust to a spinning mill”, going on to “thank God there are no factories in Hungary”.7 Thirty-seven years later, Imre Madách wrote a scene for his Tragedy of Man in which Adam is likewise bowled over by the liberty and energy-releasing dynamism of London’s capitalist society:

No more taboos, restrictions, segregation,
no gruesome phantoms stalking from the past
to be enshrined and glorified by custom
the curse and plague of future generations

—only to be abruptly disillusioned by its downside (“no competition where their rules are crooked”, “no independence where the hungry millions / must bend to someone’s yoke to keep alive”).8

Differing perspectives on reform

Ironically it was the Catholic Széchenyi who was later to change his view to a positive one about the necessity of efficient manufacturing, although his aristocratic attitudes retained a strong colouring of religious humanitarianism. His great projects grew from the mind of a visionary romantic and apostle of national aspiration, yet they were firmly grounded in utilitarian logic. In the views of the Lutheran Kossuth, who is rightly regarded as Hungary‘s first professional politician, a narrower focus of political calculation may be discerned: certainly he espoused a radical, egalitarian agenda for modernization and embourgeoisement; but the agenda was skewed towards the interests of the lesser nobility from which he came, the chief upholders of the autonomous county system. These differences in outlook led to a significantly differentiated reception of ideas that originated in the French, British and American Enlightenments. Széchenyi, for example, remained a steadfast protagonist of free trade, while Kossuth (under the influence of the ideas of Friedrich List) argued for protectionism (or at least a defensive tariff zone) and indeed set up a Protective Industrial Union. Then again, Széchenyi (in common with the liberals Baron Eötvös and Ferenc Deák) saw the absolute requirement of a strong centralized administration (in the British context indicated by the auto-nomy and legislative monopoly of the national parliament), if his country was to be successfully modernized; but Kossuth still saw the political milieu of the venerable counties in which he had been nurtured as the core of democracy and national identity. Often he seemed to gloss over the fact that they could also be the bulwark of anachronistic privilege, hostile to any change that did not enhance the
interests of the gentry. Lastly, Széchenyi, a child of the Enlightenment in so many respects, believed in the leading role of the aristocracy (who should be far-sighted and virtuous men, rather like Plato’s philosopher kings), even in a state where feudalism had been dismantled. The populist Kossuth, on the other hand, was a man whose appeal was increasingly shaped by a mass audience, just as he also aspired to articulate the will of the masses. It was this very gift that could be fatal to him, leading eventually to disastrous miscalculations on the nationality issue; here, Széchenyi displayed greater insight and vision in his articulation of the problem, notwithstanding a certain ambivalence in his attitude to Jews. The great Austrian dramatist of the 19th cen-tury, Franz Grillparzer, movingly articulated the sacred mission of a dynasty; Széchenyi, by contrast, believed in the sacred mission of individual nations, but not that these missions should be mutually exclusive. Indeed, he shared Grillparzer’s anxiety (which proved to be well-founded) about mankind’s ever-imminent fall from grace through nationalism, whereby esteem of one’s own national culture is maintained chiefly by fear and hatred of others—as Grillparzer puts it, the descent “von der Humanität durch die Nazionalität zur Bestialität”.
Most of the issues on which Széchenyi and Kossuth differed are fundamental to the history of Britain and Europe in the 19th century, even if the way in which they were argued was determined by the particular national context. Hungarian intellectuals and political activists watched closely to see how the political establishment of Victorian Britain dealt with the free trade issue, or responded to pressure from middle-class commercial interests for more say in government, or failed to respond to the demands of the working man formulated by the Chartists, or even more lamentably failed to free itself from its Protestant, imperialistic Weltanschauung when dealing with Ireland. (Baron Eötvös, for instance, even published a long essay on Poverty in Ireland in 1840). However, the lively interest in Britain, what conservative opponents of reform in Hungary disparagingly dubbed “Anglomania”, had its roots further back in the spread of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, and in particular in the dissemination of ideas mediated by freemasonry. A brief survey of this phenomenon may help to illuminate why reformers in a Catholic-dominated, agrarian, land-locked country, that was subordinate to a foreign dynasty, believed that the experience of an aggressively expanding maritime power with fast developing industrialization and a strong bourgeois layer, a state moreover founded on Protestant supremacy, was (or should be) relevant to their own country.

The Enlightenment and Freemasonry

In the late 18th century travel abroad for Hungarians was a privilege of the nobility, although they might carry a train of retainers with them, as did Ferenc Széchényi (father of István), who travelled to England in 1787 with his wife, his Hungarian secretary, his Swiss doctor and two servants.9 Even the nobility, however, had to negotiate a passport with the Vienna court, not always easy in the climate of official paranoia which increased to fever pitch following the French Revolution in 1789 and a subsequent failed Jacobin conspiracy in Hungary (1794). Both the American and French revolutions had a powerful impact on the élite of Hungary, while the ideas brought into circulation by the thinkers of the French Enlightenment (most notably Montesquieu’s De L’Esprit des Lois) not only influenced Habsburg rulers like Joseph II and his sucessor, Leopold II, but also contributed to the admiration for England and its supposed preservation of ancient freedoms somewhat rhapsodically described by the great French thinker.
One of the most agreeable aspects of Montesquieu’s writing was his openness to other civilizations and the lessons they might have for one’s own, a tendency ridiculed by that pillar of English conservatism, Dr Johnson. (“Whenever Montesquieu wants to support a strange opinion,” wrote the coffee-house sage, “he quotes you the practice of Japan or of some other distant country. To support polygamy he tells you of the island of Formosa, where there are ten women born for one man.”)10 A major feature of the Enlightenment, therefore, was the tendency to look for hints, if not role models, in societies previously considered as threatening rivals (or, if non-Christian, as barbarous). It was in this spirit that Hungarian intellectuals looked inter alia to England, just as Anglo-Scottish intellectuals, such as Adam Smith or David Hume, drew inspiration from France. Montesquieu’s empirical respect for other cultures was transmuted in the Romantic era, most conspicuously in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, into an almost mystical notion of the sacred mission of individual cultures (assuming they were strong enough to survive), and there is a great deal of Herder‘s attitudes (in a positive sense) in the thinking of Count Széchenyi. The sorry history of nineteenth century nationalism should not be adduced to degrade the dignified love of country that Széchenyi typically exhibited, a love which assumed that the homeland could be subject to improvement by studying the experience of others. The charge of “Anglomania”, levelled against him, was particularly absurd insofar as he was critical of many things in England (referring perceptively to a strain of “intolerance” underlying the mask of liberal thought) and (in common with Kossuth) specifically stated that each country should only take from another what was suitable for local circumstances.
If these factors are borne in mind, it becomes easier to understand the socially conservative, yet (by the standards of the day) politically liberal stance of many reform-minded Hungarian nobles and some of the county officials (honoratiores), who equated their own interests with those of the nation. They did so quite naturally, since they were indeed, in a quasi-constitutional and legal sense, the natio Hungarica, insofar as that had been fixed in stone by the famous Tripartitum drawn up by István Werboýczy. Published in 1517, three years after the bloody suppression of the great peasant revolt led by György Dózsa, Werboýczy‘s legal code had notoriously delivered the Hungarian peasants into perpetual serfdom. On the other hand, the point has been well made that many of those from the middling and lesser nobility who were to espouse reform in the 1830‘s were the very people who, on paper at least, stood to lose most by peasant liberation and tax reform: the magnates had enough assets to adapt to anything the new dispensation was likely to demand of them, but the lesser nobles lacked capital to hire labour and invest. It may be that poverty-stricken privilege within a society where the majority of the population was oppressed by the law, while a small minority enjoyed virtual legal immunity, had by then become an embarrassment to them.
Whether or not that was really the case, it is clear that the influence of speculative freemasonry, which had spread from England to the continent in the early and mid-18th century, had provided the impetus for the reconsideration of some of the most treasured assumptions about the Hungarian constitution and about governance in general. A large number of intellectual Hungarian aristocrats had become adherents of freemasonry, including such leading figures as Draskovich, Erdoýdy, Festetics, Batthyány, Podmaniczky, Csáky and even Széchenyi‘s ultra-loyal father as a young man. Like his son, he found himself torn between loyalty to the Emperor (although he resigned all his official posts in 1786, when Joseph II began consistently to ignore the constitution) and his Hungarian patriotism.11 The Masonic Constitutional System of Liberty, drawn up by Draskovich in the 1770‘s and heavily influenced by the ideas of Montesquieu, seems to have won his complete approval.
The British Grand Lodge, founded in 1717, approved and strongly influenced continental lodges until the Berlin one was set up in 1740, possibly as a device of Frederick the Great to gain influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, as Margaret Jacob has pointed out, German freemasons in the 1780‘s still identified “our freedom [as] the tradition of the British nation”, a tradition which “embodied British cultural values associated with the potentially subversive religious toleration, relaxed fraternizing among men of mixed and widely disparate social backgrounds, an ideology of works and merit, and not least of constitution and elections.”12 This somewhat romanticized picture (the bitter struggle for Catholic emancipation in Ireland gives a truer picture of British “religious tolerance”) nevertheless illustrated how deep the rosy picture of the English polity painted by Montesquieu had sunk into the consciousness of continental Europe. It is perhaps in the context of these attributes, or supposed attributes, that a leading mason, József Podmaniczky, (according to a secret police report) secretly offered the Hungarian throne to an English duke in 1788, if the Habsburgs could be successfully toppled. (It ought to be said, however, that offering the Hungarian throne around was then in fashion: Louis Philippe d‘Orléans, a possible ruler of a projected independent Austrian Netherlands, had also been considered, as was Duke Karl August of Weimar. The latter was tempted to accept, until a magisterial blast from Goethe put him back on the straight and narrow).13
The disillusion of the multi-talented József Podmaniczky with Emperor Joseph II, under whom he had made a glittering career as a Lutheran from the gentry class promoted to a baronetcy in the hope of winning over potentially troublesome elements, was doubtless sealed, if not determined, by Joseph’s Freemasonry Patent of 1785. This subjected the free-thinking masons to central, indeed to police supervision. Joseph (who had once been suspected of being a mason himself, his father Franz Stefan of Lorraine, having been initiated in 1733 at the English ambassador‘s residence at The Hague) thereby destroyed much of the good will engendered by his enlightened Tolerance Patent of 1781. This had extended religious tolerance to Protestants, fomerly banned from the imperial civil service under the terms of the Carolina Resolutio. Since about a third of the Hungarians were Protestant, it comes as no surprise to find that there was also a Protestant preponderance in Hungarian freemasonry in the 1770‘s and 1780‘s; of the one thousand or so members of Hungarian lodges, three-quarters were landed gentry, for the most part either Lutheran or Calvinist.14 As George Barany points out, Protestantism actually came to be identified with the very notion of reform, insofar as Catholic conservatives were to refer to the “Reform Party” and the “Protestant Party” interchangeably, when commenting on the proceedings of the Lower Diet between 1832 and 1836.15
Notwithstanding this clear connection with Protestantism, caution should be exercised about attributing too much direct British influence on Hungarian lodges. Religious tolerance was an issue fundamental to continental masonry, yet only lip service was paid to it in the English lodges, whose members came from the hegemonical Protestant majority of the political establishment and did not bestir themselves on behalf of Catholic or Jewish emancipation. Theirs was a very different perspective from that of a Hungarian Protestant, who was part of an officially mistrusted minority—which probably explains why the Draskovich Observance mentioned above followed so closely the spirit of De L‘Esprit des Lois. However, English freemasonry did have other indirect effects, both by making issues in political economy and even commerce, a less alien topic for the social élite in Hungary, and by exerting an emblematic aesthetic influence, for example in the aristocratic cult of parks and gardens. Géza Hajós has made some suggestive remarks about Viennese gardens (including one laid out by the Esterházys) and the way in which their symbolic architecture and libertarian English design may be linked to freemasonry.16 In Pest, the first park to which the public had (albeit limited) access was laid out in 1799 in the English style by László Orczy, a member of the First Innocence Lodge; subsequently both the Palatine‘s park on the Margaret Island and the City Park showed strong English influence, particularly in the planting of different species of trees from many lands and the design of meandering paths that allowed the private experience of unspoiled nature in a romantic setting. Elsewhere (at Hédervár, Tata, Csákvár, Martonvásár and Kismarton) formal Baroque gardens were replanted in the English style with the help of gardeners who had studied their craft in England, or entirely new English gardens were laid out.
The stress on the individual‘s right to his private experience of the garden (and perhaps to meditate in the garden‘s masonic shrines) was a departure from the regimentation and rhetorical display of Baroque garden design, which also made little allowance for private space. However, this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that in England itself the great landscaped parks were still for the most part an assertion of the landocracy‘s rights of ownership, on which hoi polloi had no rights at all. Exceptional were the great royal parks of London (Hyde Park, St James Park, Green Park) that had once been Henry VIII‘s hunting grounds, and whose opening to the public in the 17th century was emblematic of a more contractual basis for the relationship between monarch and people. Yet, one hundred and fifty years later, John Nash‘s speculative development of Regents Park was initially conceived as a manifestation of the property-based liberties of the prosperous middle and upper middle classes, the whole spirit of which (as for the nobility) elevated individual rights by maintaining exclusion and exclusiveness. The park was not in fact opened to the public until 1838, which was ten years after its completion, and Nash himself had said he wanted to create the illusion that each villa overlooked its own park: with no other villa in sight it would seem as if “the entire park belonged to it.”17 This was the English version of what Adolf Loos attacked as in-supportable pretension in Ornament und Verbrechen, contemptuously dismissing “his Majesty the Plebs”, who lived in a modest dwelling concealed behind the façade of a palace. Still, the English bourgeoisie may have seen it differently—as a laudable aspiration to the aristocrat‘s perception of his property, a levelling up of society rather than the levelling down to mediocrity which cultural pessimists (and also liberals like Ferenc Pulszky) were ready to denounce.

From enlightened abstraction to practical measures

The origins of freemasonry lay in mastery of the geometrician‘s complex skills, a mastery that naturally developed into monopolization of knowledge (a commercial weapon) and the control of initiation (leading to the formation of an artisan, later an intellectual, élite). However, the original criteria of craftsmen‘s skills, and then of more general intellectual ability in the period of the Enlightenment, gave masonry its meritocratic tinge, while also suggesting an alliance between the empiricism of 18th-century scientific inquiry and a progressive Weltanschauung. Moreover, Newton‘s discovery of the laws of gravitation at the end of the 17th century suggested to thinkers of the Enlightenment that universal laws might also be discovered to apply in the social world of man, specifically in methods of governance and economic behaviour. Jeremy Bentham‘s utilitarian philosophy (in which the Széchenyis, father and son, were well versed, while Kossuth was to read his works when imprisoned for reporting the proceedings of the County Administrations from 1837) represented an attempt to regulate societies according to how men are, not how they ought to be in the light of some abstract moral or religious precept. The same could be said of Adam Smith‘s more sophisticated account of the unintended benefits of the pursuit of economic self-interest. Both thinkers preferred the concept of improvement to that of perfectibility and both assumed that progress could actually be achieved by the adoption of certain modes of behaviour and the avoidance of others. Not only did this imply a complete liberation from the static and still, in many ways, medieval view of the world that prevailed under Hungarian feudalism, it also suggested a willingness to take calculated risks, to invest for long-term results and to adopt many other features of bourgeois capitalism. There are innumerable remarks by Széchenyi that suggest the influence of this way of thinking in general and of Bentham or Smith in particular, but one example from his book on credit will suffice, where he states that “not fertile plains, mountains, minerals, climate and so forth make up the public force, but the mind that can utilize these. The real power of the nation is revealed in the number of educated heads....”18
However, the rewards of sophisticated commerce and industrialization that Britain was beginning to enjoy would not have been possible without the wealth generated by the preceding revolution in agriculture. The young Széchenyi had perhaps been more percipient than he knew when he opined that a backward country like Hungary should not make a dash for industrialization, but concentrate on improving the productivity of agriculture, since an accumulated agricultural surplus was indeed the base and sine qua non of Britain reaching what economic theorists describe as the “take-off point” for economic growth. Some reforming Hungarian nobles, and more especially their factors, were fascinated by the ideas of English agronomists such as Arthur Young and Jethro Tull, but were hampered in their efforts to employ the new methods in agriculture, partly by differences in soil and climate, but more often by the feudal system. Whereas in Britain an entire class of capitalist tenant farmers had grown up, Hungarian serfs were still paying tithes and performing socage. Leases were unstable because of the notorious and ubiquitous entailment of properties, but worse than all this—as Széchenyi protested in his polemic entitled Hitel (Credit)—was the
virtual absence of credit on reasonable terms, which prevented long-term investment and modernization. Raising the necessary mortgage to improve the land was almost always ruinous, since potential lenders knew that the aviticity law (oýsiség), whereby land was entailed to the landowner and his successors in perpetuity, effectively prevented the distraint of property offered as collateral security.
Széchenyi himself, although a wealthy landowner, was refused credit by a Viennese bank shortly after the occurrence of one of the most notorious Hungarian financial scandals involving the powerful Count Grassalkovich, whose agents induced Viennese savers to invest in interest-bearing bonds in 1825 to raise two million forints on the collateral of the Grassalkovich estates. Given the bad
reputation of Hungarian loans, special prospectuses were issued purporting to offer guarantees of repayment and interest and a Viennese bank underwrote the offer. Specifically, the Count undertook to forego the protection of Hungarian feudal law in case of dispute and to make himself accountable to an Austrian court. These assurances proved to be worthless. When the interest ceased after a couple of years, creditors found that the Viennese bank washed its hands of the matter; although a Viennese court found in their favour, Count Grassalkovich blandly invoked Hungarian law to refuse payment and was backed by the County. The latter even issued a judgement condemning the usurious practices of his creditors.19 If this sort of behaviour was possible by one of the leading families of the land, one could be forgiven for thinking that many nobles were simply drones who dressed up their parasitic crookery in legal niceties and the rhetoric of patriotism. Although the Grassalkovich case was probably exceptional, it lends force to Széchenyi‘s heartfelt writings on the necessity of a ius cambio-mercantile, a mercantile code that would make commercial undertakings binding on participants. The usurious rates of interest of which Hungarian nobles self-righteously complained (e.g. Count Carl Andrásssy in Umrisse einer möglichen Reform in Ungarn—1833) were of course primarily the consequence of the high risk attached to dealing with a layer of society that had formed the law in its own image. Széchenyi‘s thinking reflects the insistence of Adam Smith that enlightened self-interest had come “to respect property rights and to regard the keeping of contractual promises as ‘reasonable expectations’... As commerce increased, there was a greater social need for honouring contractual promises, and a greater sense of disappointment felt by those subjected to broken promises. Contract law was a response to that need.”20
Apart from the above considerations, Hungarian agricultural reformers were hampered by the imperial revenue system which required the maintenance of mass peasant holdings on which the taxes were raised from which the nobility were exempt. The liberation of what nobles contemptuously called the misera plebs contribuens, and the spreading of the taxation burden, were items high on Széchenyi‘s agenda, and by the same token, the insistence that nobles should pay the toll on the projected Chain Bridge between Buda and Pest was of immense symbolic importance as representing an irreversible step in the direction of a civil society. Significantly, it was the Lord Chief Justice who burst out weeping when the institution of a toll was agreed by the Diet in 1835, correctly—from his point of view—forecasting that it would lead to the downfall of the Hungarian nobility and proclaiming that he would himself never cross the bridge as long as he lived. Nothing illustrates better than his reaction the point made by Bentham and Smith that laws generally reflected the interests of those who framed them, and all too often therefore offered a refuge for those who wished to circumvent natural justice. The lesser Hungarian nobility were indeed obsessed with law, and in the 1840‘s it was the proud boast of Pest “to possess more lawyers than Bohemia, Styria and Dalmatia combined.”21
If the feudal law was an obstacle to land transfer and innovation in agriculture, there was still the possibility of practical measures. In this respect the founding of the Georgikon in 1797 on the Keszthely estate of Széchenyi‘s uncle, Count György Festetics, was of considerable significance. Here a new spirit was evident, to counter the wasteful “slash and burn” mentality of traditional feudal agriculture, which had only been encouraged by the fact that Hungary was relatively rich in cultivable land per head of the population, and that under the one hundred and forty years of Turkish occupation much land (with no peasantry to work it) had been left to “rest”. This apparent blessing was now also a spur to inefficiency, for if one strip was exhausted, it was often simply abandoned and an unworked one brought into cultivation. Inefficient cultivation meant that yields were low under the feudal system. The English agronomist, Arthur Young, spoke of producing 22 hectolitres of corn per hectare (2.471 acres) in 1770 on the best land in Britain, while the peasant farming of France was estimated to produce only 16 hl/ha; some thirty years later Germany with Central Europe were still said to be producing only some 10-11 hl/ha.
The English methods for increasing productivity were mediated by German writers: in particular, Albrecht Thaer‘s Einleitung zur Kenntnis der englischen Landwirtschaft (1798–1800) was influential (and sometimes misleading), while a Hungarian writer, Ludovicus Mitterpacker, was clearly drawing on a German translation of Arthur Young‘s Six Months Tour in the Northern Provinces of England in his Elementa rei rusticae in usum academiarum Regni Hungariae (Buda, 1777–1794). The first Principal of the Georgikon agronomic academy, János Nagyváthy, took many of his ideas from Mitterpacker, but later attributed the agricultural slump after the Napoleonic Wars to the introduction of novel methods. However, Ferenc Pethe, a Georgikon lecturer who had visited England, enthusiastically promoted English methods of varied crop rotation and intensive stock farming. Pethe‘s frustration at the damage to character, as well as to efficiency, caused by the feudal system mirrors the views of Széchenyi and is amusingly expressed in his Pallérozott mezei gazdaság (Refined Husbandry, 1805–1814): “The Englishman when he is not working sleeps while wide awake; when he is working, he is all fire. The Hungarian, when he is working, sleeps while he toils; when he is not working, he gets tired fidgeting.“22
Inherent conservatism and lack of interest in productivity gains is indeed the eternal lament of reformers, some of whom were at least half aware that the basis for the great economic revolutions in Britain was laid with enclosures and wealth incentives for tenant farmers; that these in turn led to agricultural innovation and a surplus, then to the development of financial services for longer term investment in agriculture, but also in business and trade; and the further surpluses from these activities went to investment in the technology and infrastructure of industrialization that would produce higher profits and buoyant consumer markets. Miklós Vay (1756–1824), a Calvinist and a Freemason, was one who perhaps dreamed of kick-starting this process in his homeland, following two visits to England (1786–88, 1790–92). To finance an eye operation in London, he sold the patents of his English weaving and spinning machines to Count Batthyány for 15,000 forints and set off with some crates of Tokaj aszú in a vain attempt to interest the English in this unique product. On his return he brought with him a carriage full of English machines and seeds, and a good supply of potatoes, which at that time were viewed with suspicion in Hungary. He
succeeded in popularizing the potato in Borsod, Szabolcs and Zemplén counties, once remarking that he was happy to hear that the peasants were beginning to steal his potatoes, since this meant that they had finally accepted their usefulness as a staple.23
Feudalism was in unholy alliance with another great obstacle to material progress in Hungary, namely the mercantilist system, imposed under Maria Theresa, that relegated the country to colonial status as the producer of cheap food for the Empire, yet provided no incentives for making agriculture more efficient. By the same token, prospects for industrialization were blocked by maintaining Hungary as a captive market for Austrian manufacturers. The issue of free trade was of course not resolved in Britain until 1846, when a Conservative Prime Minister repealed the protectionist Corn Laws and split his party in doing so. The shortcomings of mercantilism had, however, been brought into debate sixty years earlier when Adam Smith published his epoch-making Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a book avidly read and greatly
admired by Széchenyi, whose father had visited and been enormously impressed by its author. Smith‘s ideas were also to a greater or lesser extent absorbed or embraced by Hungarian intellectuals of the Enlightenment, such as Miklós Skerlecz, József Podmaniczky and János Szapáry. The Piarist educated Károly Koppi, whose career was cut short by involvement in the Jacobin conspiracy, even wanted to found a proto-Business School in Pest‘s Pázmány University, where students would learn about natural produce and manufacturing, as well as commercially useful topics such as currencies, languages, orthography, calligraphy, mathematics and economic geography.24
In general these intellectuals divided their allegiance between the ideas of Smith and his French predecessors such as Turgot (who coined the phrase laissez-faire in 1757) and Francois Quesnay, the protagonist of physiocratic doctrines. It is not hard to see the appeal of physiocracy in countries with relatively vast land reserves, like France and 18th-century Hungary, but its fundamental thesis that only an agricultural worker actually produced anything (everybody else, including merchants and the bureaucracy, was merely a sterile manipulator of what the peasant produced) was disastrously wrong-headed, as Adam Smith understood only too well. In our own time a similar nostalgia has been expressed about obsolescent types of manufacturing vis-à-vis the service industries and finance, a recycling of the same superstition that wealth is created only by the production of tangible commodities. Worse still, physiocracy encouraged a quasi-ideological mythologization of the land and a blindness to Adam Smith‘s great insight “that labour, not nature, was the source of value.”25 The wasteful Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union today is a tribute to the lingering power of the land mystique in Europe.
It is interesting that Széchenyi, with his customary perception, fully understood the implications of Adam Smith‘s labour-oriented espousal of free trade, while Kossuth, the protectionist, often displayed lingering traces of physiocratic idealization of the land. In a letter (November 17, 1855) to a Chartist newspaper, written during his English exile, he compared the condition of exploited labour in England and the Hungarian peasantry as follows: “In Hungary … the social evil is not so great. Why? Because the leading feature of the country happily remained chiefly agricultural—manufacture and commerce are only subordinate, auxiliary elements. And agriculture in general always secures the daily bread; a field labourer may be short in cash, but bread he has. We have therefore but to preserve this character of our country and the social condition of Hungary never will become as sick as that of England is; the daily existence of millions never will be precariously subject to market prices and speculation.”26 And further: “the condition of (English) society has been framed by and under the paramount influence of the commercial interest; which is not productive itself, only stimulating and exchanging.” It is true, of course, that Széchenyi had once “thanked God there [were] no factories in Hungary,” a reaction to the often appalling social cost of industrialization that he may have witnessed on his English travels. On the other hand, he undertook a careful study of English, Swiss, German and Italian milling industries before introducing the first steam mills in Hungary. In Barany‘s words: “He pointed out that such a development would benefit farmers and at the same time give an opportunity to otherwise resourceless people to make a living as millhands, as coal miners in the Mohács region, or as carpenters preparing the wooden staves to hold the flour. To assure the success of the new enterprise, Széchenyi asked the abolition of price controls in the flour business.”27
Such remarks throw his differences with Kossuth into sharp relief, for Kossuth often comes close to sounding like a Hungarian version of the conservative radical, William Cobbett (1763–1835), with whose writings and political career he would certainly have been familiar. The similarities become apparent in any reading of Cobbett‘s nostalgic and fiercely indignant account of England in the depressed phase of the agricultural revolution in the 1820‘s. As George Woodcock puts it in his introduction to Cobbett‘s great masterpiece, Rural Rides, the old radical was outraged “by the cottager evicted from his holding in the great enclosures of the common lands, the farm labourer living on potatoes while he grows beef and wheat for the city dwellers, the Catholic suffering under political disabilities, the factory worker in Bounderby‘s Mill, the pauper insulted by overseers and thrust into the workhouse by utilitarian philanthropists: of all these Cobbett was the Quixotic defender.”28 On the other hand, Széchenyi, as a great landowner, but also a perceptive observer, still believed that successful industrialization depended on prior development of agricultural production, which was indeed the experience of Britain. As for the mills, by the end of the 19th century they were Hungary‘s most important export industry, acting as catalyst to the rapidly growing business of food processing.29

Progress and nationalism

In the clear distinctions between the politico-economic stance of Széchenyi and that of Kossuth is adumbrated a more profound difference of approach to Hungary’s problems. Széchenyi was early attracted to the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, as the title originally planned for his book on credit suggests (he wanted it to be called About People, or the Bases of Happiness). There are in his thought a number of creative tensions—that between the Benthamite principle of the happiness of the greatest number and the respect due to the individual, or that between the notion of economic efficiency and the potential inhumanity of a system whose criteria of success seemed to elevate monetary value over human compassion, or that between love of his country and contempt for the apathy, ignorance and backwardness that prevailed there, and finally that between a belief in the sacred mission of individual national cultures and a realization of the necessity for supranational thinking and cosmopolitan sympathies.
In this last respect, the Anglo-Scottish contribution to European culture is of particular interest, and the position of Scotland culturally, politically and economically with regard to England has some thought-provoking implications for that of Hungary in the context of the Habsburg hegemony. David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and other giants of the Scottish Enlightenment were the products of a Presbyterian-based, democratically organized educational system coupled with the economic benefits that flowed from the Act of Union with England of 1707. As Jerry Muller has pointed out, their Calvinist heritage linked Scottish academe to the tradition of the great universities of the Netherlands, the Scottish development of Roman law brought its legal institutions closer to the continental legal framework than were those of England, while a historically determined tendency to draw inspiration from non-English sources, as well as links going back to “the auld alliance”, created a powerful axis with the thinkers of the French Enlightenment. Scottish intellec-tuals were often more genuinely cosmopolitan than their English counterparts (the Grand Tour of English milords being more an Olympian survey of foreigners coupled with a little opportunistic antiquity purchasing); but theirs was a “provincial cosmopolitanism” implying a strong and pragmatic impulse for self-improvement.30 In other words, these “North Britons”, as the Lowland Scots intelligentsia preferred to style itself, capitalized on their distinctive cultural traditions to bring something distinctive to the notion of “Britain” and “British”, just as their descendants were to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by going out and running the British Empire, since they were denied the plum jobs in the English establishment. Perhaps it is no accident that the upwardly mobile Scot, Adam Clark, was the one who went abroad and grew in stature in his job as Baumeister, while his superior, the Englishman Tierney Clark, was content to be (and could afford to be) a stay-at-home administrator of the project. Equally it may be significant that Adam Clark nobly supported the cause of his adopted Hungary in the 1848 War of Independence, while Tierney Clark was notoriously contemptuous of it.
The North Britons were anxious to be distinguished from the folk museum of the Highlands on their back doorstep—it was usually Lowlanders who, as factors to the hated Dukes of Sutherland, were responsible for some of the most brutal of the so-called “clearances”, when the feudal subsistence economy of the Highlands was being destroyed to make way for intensive sheep-runs, and whole clans were driven into exile in North America or the Antipodes. On the other hand, it was the Lowlander and antiquary, Sir Walter Scott, who rekindled the national myth of the Land of the Gaels that reinforced Scottish identity, succeeding in large measure in the invention of a Kulturvolk, despite the discredit potentially attaching to such an enterprise after the literary forgeries of Ossian. Much of Scott‘s almost unparalleled international success as an author, not least in Hungary, may be attributed to his achievement in re-inventing a nation that had lost its independent statehood, and doing so by invoking a historical continuity that upheld national dignity. Robert Walsh in his Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England (1832) encounters a bookseller in Transylvanian Hermannstadt(Nagyszeben/Sibiu) who has just placed a huge portrait on his wall of “Le sieur Valtere Skote, l‘homme le plus célèbre en toute l‘Europe”. French and German translations of Scott‘s novels formed a sizeable part of his stock.31 John Paget encountered an impoverished Jew on his Hungarian travels, who pulled from his pocket a well-thumbed German translation of Ivanhoe, assuring the Englishman that he had read many others of Scott‘s works and expressing profound dismay on learning that the great man was no longer alive.32
From the point of view of a progressive conservative, Scott‘s genius lay in reconciling national aspirations with historical and political realities. His stage-management of George IV‘s visit to Scotland in 1822 managed to flatter all interested parties: the Highlanders with the myth that the roots of Scottish identity lay in the (substantially invented) culture of the Gael, the “North Britons” with an emphasis on their contribution to the British weal and the Hanoverian monarch with a show of loyalty and affection, which survived even the spectacle of the corpulent German libertine sporting a kilt. The kind of ingenious marriage of myth and political convenience that Scott pulled off was closer to the “synthesis of enlightened Empiricism and romantic nationalism” to be found in the thinking of Zsigmond Kemény and others of the “Literary Deák Party” than to Széchenyi‘s quasi-mystical Herderian idea of the individual nation‘s unique mission, still less the myopic populism of Kossuth.33 Interestingly, Kemény, who stood for “mediatory liberalism”, was a popularizer of Lord Macaulay‘s intensely Whig-orientated, Protestant and materialistic History of England in Hungary, drawing lessons from it for his homeland in a long review of Antal Csengery‘s translation into Hungarian of the first part of the history, published in 1853. Baron Eötvös was also of this group and it was he who coined the pregnant phrase “peaceful co-existence” (békés együttélés), a pragmatic locution that suggested a way of reconciling national aspiration with political and economic reality long before it acquired its particularized twentieth century meaning.33

An inverted perspective:
some concluding thoughts on the influence of the British political culture in Hungary

As will have become clear from the foregoing, the positions of Hungary as a nation and its reformers as a political class rendered the attraction of British ideas strong, their application difficult, in many areas impossible. If British Protestant freemasons represented an influence close to the heart and summit of the establishment, Hungarian Protestant freemasons represented a distrusted (albeit substantial) minority, even when, as in many cases, they were at least nominally loyal to the Habsburg regime. The greatest proponent of free trade in Britain, Adam Smith, was able to argue his case in the spirit of enlightened self-interest, by suggesting that a blind adherence to mercantilism prevented all classes from becoming as prosperous as they might otherwise become. Moreover, there was a sense in which Britannia, ruling the waves and a large slice of the world‘s markets, could afford to take the risk of abolishing the trade barriers behind which its hegemony had actually been built up. A Hungarian proponent of free trade was at once in collision with the interests of the Cameralist government in Vienna, as also of the entrenched forces of feudalism, the whole structure of which was predicated on protection from the competitive dynamism of a capitalist economy.
Even if feudalism was done away with, Kossuth‘s fears for the nascent bourgeois economy exposed to the blasts of competition from economically more powerful states was understandable. Even today, competiton is not very welcome in some sectors of what was once part of the Austro-Hungarian economy, yet it was already instinctive to the thinking of Adam Clark, who mounted a robust defence against critics of Tierney Clark‘s bridge design with an argument drawn from the British experience of industrialization: “Perhaps no other country in the world,” he wrote, “offers a broader field for the practice of large-scale hydro-engineering as Great Britain, whose insular location and highly developed trade makes it necessary to build innumerable bridges, harbours, docks, canals and so on, whereby a lively and open competition is of the utmost importance, if such works are to be carried out at the smallest possible cost.”34 (My italics).
Secondly, an Anglo-Scot or “North Briton”, after the Act of Union, could preserve his national dignity while vigorously trying to eradicate “Scotticisms” from his English speech and formal writings (as did both Adam Smith and Walter Scott); for a Hungarian the opposite was the case, and the revival of his native tongue in opposition to the German of the regime became perhaps the single most important constitutent of his national identity. And lastly, a supremely successful nation, apparently in charge of its own destiny and largely unthreatened externally after the defeat of Napoleon, could accommodate social and political change in which new wealth opportunities consoled for loss of privilege. In Hungary the dismantling of privilege and the modernization of society could plausibly be presented by conservative vested interests as an attack on the nation itself. It was these difficulties that Charles Dickens described in his brilliant and
moving account of the career of Széchenyi ten years after the latter‘s death. “Who but a dreamer,“ he writes, “would expect a whole people, and a singularly impulsive people, to outspeed time and pass at one stroke without stumbling from centuries of feudalism into the most experimental and complex form of modern society?”35
What especially appealed to Dickens was Széchenyi‘s passionate moderation, since he himself belonged to the “change of heart” school of thought (as George Orwell termed it in his essay on Dickens), which believes that persuasion and reason, an appeal to conscience, will lead to a “change of heart” on the part of those who abuse their position in society. In the same way, Dickens applauded Széchenyi‘s views on ethnic minorities, which he describes as “to this day (i.e. 1870) far in advance of those of his countrymen—far in advance indeed of the opinions that still prevail in England respecting the treatment of alien races” and capable of being studied to advantage by any Englishman “who shares the inherited responsibility of governing Ireland and India.”36 Like Széchenyi, the progressive liberal in Dickens sought to square the circle, to achieve both liberty and justice. Yet as a pragmatist, he would probably have seen the force of Baron Eötvös‘s argument in Der Einfluss der herrschenden Ideen des 19. Jahrhunderts auf den Staat (1851–54), namely that equality, liberty and nationality were often mutually contradictory ideas. In Eötvös‘s view, levels of civilization were hard to judge, since greater freedom for some was always at the cost of greater inequality and economic repression for others (he cites the English treatment of the Irish and the American exploitation of slaves and slaughtering of native Americans). Nonetheless, Dickens is drawn to Széchenyi‘s moral position, which is close to his own: he quotes approvingly Széchenyi‘s exhortation to remember that “our salvation depends, not on the assertion of political power, but the cultivation of personal virtue.” By the same token, he is hostile to Kossuth, citing Széchenyi‘s famous denunciation of the populist, where he puts words into his opponent‘s mouth that could have come from one of the more histrionic passages in a Dickens novel: “...I aspired to command others, I could not govern myself. It was my boast to be the benefactor of my country. It is my shame to have been only the puppet of her popular passions.”37
When faced with officially sponsored injustice, English bourgeois radicals like Charles Dickens were eloquent in their denunciation, but they were no revolutionaries. Somewhere, they believed, a middle way could be found between quietism and violence, even if 19th-century Britain had seen plenty of both, not to mention Ireland. It was perhaps this middle way of working with the grain of political realities, yet trying to appeal to the enlightened self-interest of their opponents, that seemed to offer a way forward for the moderate, centralist reformers in Hungary. Széchenyi himself gave expression to this often paradoxical mixture of moral passion and conservative caution when he proclaimed: “I have awakened my countrymen in order that they might walk upright and conduct themselves like men; not in order that they may throw themselves out of the window.”38 Symbolically, as well as materially, the erection of the Chain Bridge was part of his great project to awaken his countrymen to new life; the best that Britain had to offer (pragmatism, commercial skills, technology), had a vital role to play in that noble undertaking. Whether or not we can speak of British influence on his strategy for change, the latter was certainly (and despite the evident impulsiveness of Szécheny‘s personality) very close in spirit to the methods of piecemeal reform favoured in Britain: “I prefer,” he told Baron Langsdorff in 1837, “to catch the bull by the tail rather than by the horns: the secret of political forces, as also of
mechanical forces, is to use only the amount required for the aim that one wants to attain.”39

NOTES

1 n This and other quotations from Count István Széchenyi‘s diaries or correpondence are taken from George Barany: Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791–1841. Princeton, 1968. This remark is cited on p. 268.
2 n Michael Joseph Quin: A Steam Voyage down the Danube. London, 1835. Vol 1. pp. 3, 6–7.
3 n W. M. Thackeray: “De Juventute” in Roundabout Papers. Cited in The Victorian Mind Ed. Gerald B. Kauvar and Gerald C. Sorensen. London, 1969. p. 119.
4 n Cited in The Victorian Mind p. 118, and taken from Samuel Smiles: The Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer. Chapter XXV: “Advance of Public Opinion in Favour of the Railway”. 5 n Ferenc Pulszky: Aus dem Tagebuche eines in Grobritannien reisenden Ungarn. Pesth. 1837.
pp. 2, 3, 101.
6 n Quoted in É. H. Haraszti: “Contemporary Hungarian Reactions to the Anti-Corn Law Movement” in Acta Historica VIII Nos. 3–4, 1961. p. 397. 7 n Barany: op. cit. pp. 74–75.
8 n Transl. by Iain MacLeod pp. 348 and 349–350 in Quest of the Miracle Stag: The Poetry of Hungary” Ed. Adam Makkai. Chicago–Budapest 1996.
9 n Vilmos Fraknói: Gróf Széchényi Ferencz. Budapest, 1903. pp. 112–116
10 n Cited in David Thomson: Political Ideas. Harmsworth, 1969. p. 81. 11 n Éva H. Balázs: Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800. Budapest, London, New York, 1997, p. 305.
12 n Margaret C. Jacob: Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe. Oxford, 1991. p. 151.
13 n For this information and that in the following paragraph I have drawn heavily on Éva H. Balázs‘s remarkable study Hungary and the Habsburgs: 1765–1800. See Note 11. 14 n Éva H. Balázs: op cit. p. 43.
15 n See George Barany: “The Liberal Challenge and its Limitations: The Religious Question at the Diet of 1843–1844.” In: Hungary and European Civilisation, Ed. György Ránki. Budapest, 1989. p. 33.
16 n See Géza Hajós: Romantische Gärten der Aufklärung: Englische Landschaftskultur des 18. Jahrhunderts in und um Wien–Wien. Köln, 1989. Chapter IV: Die Freimaurerei und der englische Garten in Wien.
17 n Quoted in J. Mordaunt Crook: “Die Erneuerung der Hauptstadt — John Nash und das “Ma-lerische’” in Metropole London: Macht und Glanz einer Weltstadt 1800–1840. Recklinghausen, 1992. p. 81.
18 n Quoted in Susanne M. Balpataky: Stephen Széchenyi and his Socio-Economic and Political Ideas. MA Research Paper prepared for Professor
C. Brock. Toronto, 1972. p. 45.
19 n For a coruscating account of this episode, see: B. G. Ivanyi: “From Feudalism to Capitalism: The Economic Background to Széchenyi‘s Reform in Hungary.” Journal of Central European Affairs. Vol. 20, No. 1. 1960. pp. 282–284.
20 n Jerry Z. Muller: Adam Smith in His Time and Ours. Princeton, 1993. p. 116.
21 n Paul Ignotus: Hungary. New York, 1972. p. 60.
22 n For this quotation and much of the information on English agricultural ideas transferred to Hungary, I am indebted to János Barta: “The English ‘New Agriculture’ in Contemporary Hungarian Agricultural Literature.” Debrecen, 1974. Angol Filológiai Tanulmányok VIII. pp. 77–89.
23 n For information about Miklós Vay, I am indebted to an article by Orsolya Szakály: Vay Miklós és az 1807. évi országgyuýlés in FONS. Vol. IV. 1997. 3. No. 3., pp. 301–323.
24 n Éva H. Balázs: op cit. pp. 296–297.
25 n Robert Heilbroner: The Worldly Philosophers. 6th Ed. London, 1991. p. 49.
26 n Quoted in É. Haraszti–Taylor: Kossuth as an English Journalist. Boulder, Colorado, 1990, pp. 393–395.
27 n Barany: op. cit. pp. 335 and 337.
28 n Introduction by George Woodcock to William Cobbett: Rural Rides. London, 1967 (1830). p. 8.
29 n Barany: op cit. p. 337.
30 n See Muller: op. cit. pp. 22–23.
31 n Robert Walsh: Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England. London, 1832. p. 302.
32 n John Paget: Hungary and Transylvania (2 Vols.). London 1839. Vol. 1. pp. 120–121.
33 n For a detailed examination of the synthesis achieved between Romanticism and the empiricism of the Enlightenment, see Mihály Szegedy-Maszák: “Enlightenment and Liberalism in the Works of Széchenyi, Kemény and Eötvös” (from which this remark is taken) in: Hungary and European Civilisation, Ed. György Ránki. Budapest. p. 24.
34 n Adam Clark: Einige Worte über den Bau der Ofner-Pesther Kettenbrücke. Pest, 1843. p. 5.
35 n Charles Dickens “All the Year Round” in New Series Vol. III. 1869–1870. p. 480.
36 n Dickens: op. cit. p. 455
37 n Dickens: op. cit p. 456
38 n Quoted in Dickens, op cit. p. 454
39 n Cited in Barany: op. cit. P. 460. (…— parce que j‘aime mieux tirer le taureau par la queue, que le prendre par les cornes: le secret des forces politiques, comme celui des forces mécaniques est de n‘en employer que la quantité nécessaire au but qu‘on veut attaindre.” The source is Baron Langsdorff‘s report to the French Ambassador Sainte-Aulaire, Pest 10th June, 1837.
n The author would like to thank Erzsébet Tokaji-Nagy and her colleagues at the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár for valuable assistance rendered in tracking down sources for this article. In addition thanks are due to Robert Evans, Móritz Csáky, Eva Csáky, Géza Galavics and Orsolya Szakály for information generously given. Last but not least Ilona Sármány-Parsons patiently assisted with Hungarian translations and read the first draft with a sharp eye. Responsibility for any errors that remain are the author’s alone.

Nicholas T. Parsons
is the author of the Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Ravette Books, 1994) and The Blue Guide to Vienna (1996).
The following is an abridged version of a chapter to appear in a volume celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Chain Bridge, to be published in 1999 by the office of the Mayor of Budapest .
 


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