Baják László Ihász István: The Hungarian National Museum History Exhibition Guide 4 - The short century of survival (1900-1990) (Budapest, 2008)

Room 16. From the Belle Epoch to the Collapse of the Monarchy (1900-1919). László Baják

to prove an insoluble problem, even though liberal laws regarding ethnicity had been operative since 1868 that were virtually unequalled in Europe. The ethnic groups - the Germans, the Jews and to some extent the Slovaks - that had better succeeded in joining the middle classes, had largely assimilated with the Hungarians. At the same time, the Ruthenians, Serbs and Romanians were obstructed from doing likewise not only because they were more backward but also by they differed in their Greek Orthodox religion. As a result of spontaneous assimilation, a greater birth rate and a smaller tendency to emigrate, by the 20

th century the Hungarian population had regained the relative majority which it had lost through settlement in the 18

th century (54.9%). Hungary's domestic policies had for a long time been governed by the Liberal Party, whose desire it was to follow the 1867 AustroHungarian Compromise and to maintain the system of dualism. However, the political calm at the turn of the century proved temporary. The most powerful opposition party, the Independence 1848 Party (with, among others, Ferenc Kossuth, son of Lajos Kossuth, at the van) grasped every opportunity to demand modifications to be made to the Compromise in the national interest. There was a peculiar contrast in that the centre of increasingly stormy domestic strife in the times following the turn of the century was one of Europe' Mihály Bíró: Invitation to a suffrage rally