[quote] Hungary, with twenty millions of population has 700,000 electors. An income of 200 kronens, or crowns, a month in cities makes a citizen a voter. In rural districts if a citizen owns a house or land he can vote, but men who work for a living, unless they own property or have the above income, have no vote. The Hungarian Parliament is composed of 450 members, but no workingman or one who could be said to represent workingmen either on a workingman’s platform or on any other political platform is among them; in fact, speaking generally, workingmen in Hungary have no political rights. In Budapest, by far the leading city in the country, poor people pay in rent about 500 crowns a year for one room, and occasionally rent a portion of that same room to a lodger to sleep for a few hours. Nearly all of the property in Budapest is owned by so-called nobles and barons. Jews rent from them nearly all property, and do nearly all commercial business, such as banking, running stores, shops and factories. They also re-rent rooms, tenements, small shops, etc., to poor people, and are blamed by the native poor for overcharging, and many forms of usury. The Hungarian, and especially the Budapest landlords have a good organization and refuse to rent rooms, shops, factories, etc., for less than the arranged or established rates named by their organization. I was informed that working people had organized a semblance of a strike against the extortionate rate of rent and unbearable conditions of houses and shops rented by them. The result was that because of the strike they were refused homes and shops to rent under any circumstances by members of the Landords’ Organization, who thus retaliated by a thoroughly organized and a rigidly conducted boycott. This caused such destitution among the participants in the strike that eventually the Hungarian government gave them permission to occupy an old and unused barracks infested with rats, and for which they had to pay in rent 500 crowns per year per room in which and in addition to their other miseries they had to contend with the rodents for such food as in the circumstances the boycotted people could buy, beg or pick up. Inhabitants of Hungary and portions of Austria are today in about the same conditions as were the people high and low in Germany and Prussia one hundred years ago, only that the former have not evidently the same ambitions as had the latter; yet it is the general impression that Hungarian civilization is as far in advance of the conditions in the neighboring Balkan States as it is behind modern German civilization. The working people’s day-dreams of emulating German progress are almost balanced by their dread of Slavonic invasion, for when the native Hungarians become troublesome to the barons, bankers and property owners by demanding improved compensation or conditions of life, they are immediately confronted with the importation of Slavs and even with hundreds of Croatians who are imported to take their places, and the latter are said to be even poorer, more docile, and cheaper workers than the Slavs. [end quote]

P.S. Ben Tillman, I’d be interested in talking to you sometime re: law. If you are willing, shoot me an e-mail at alciabiades200@yahoo.com.

God bless you Ben Tillman!!!

I wish we had even 1/10th of a percentage more of the White Professional Class like yourself on Our side!

Keep raising awareness amongst your/Our colleagues and People.