Balázs György (szerk.): The abolition of serfdom and its impact on rural culture, Guide to the Exhibition Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Revolution and War if Independence of 1848-49 (Budapest-Szentendre, Museum of Hungarian Agriculture-Hungarian Open-Air Museum, 1998.)

poet who wrote the Hungarian national anthem spoke about the state of the tax-paying Hungarian peasants at a meeting of the Szatmár County Assembly as follows: „... cattlebreeding and trade has become very restricted for the whole tax-paying community of the county. One can safely say that peasants live not on the income of cattle-breeding but by sacrificing whatever they i. have. Those who have nothing to sacrifice have to work very hard to survive..." Berzeviczy, Gergely, the father of modern Hungarian literature of economics, characterized the defencelessness of the peasantry as follows: „...The serfs tenure and its appertainances belong to the landlord who can take them away from him and give them Kölcsey, Ferenc (1790-1838) t0 some

0ne else. Serfs are not allowed to hold public offices and institute legal proceedings themselves against anyone, let alone their landlords. Landlords administer justice on them and in their cases against others, even if they themselves are involved. It is, therefore, obvious that peasants have no civil and personal rights at all." During the cholera epidemics of 1831, a peasant revolt broke out in Northern Hungary. Although the Vienna Court suppressed the revolt by force, it was a warning for the nobility that the foreign dynasty might exploit the divided nature of the Hungarian society at any lime. What is more, Hungarian noblemen were often confronted with Slovak, Rumanian, Ruthenian or Serb peasants. Count Széchenyi, István, a descendant of one of the most oustanding aristocratic families in the country, roused stagnant public life with his books entitled HiteI (Credit), Világ 26