Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/605

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HUMPHREYS


545


HUNGARIAN


claims. They were accordingly condemned to death, and suffered at Tyburn with the greatest fortitude and resignation.

GiLLow, Bibl. Diet. Eng. Cath., s. v. Middlejnore; Morris, Troid>les, 1; Dodd, Church History,!, 2'iO; Dugdale, Monas^i- con, VI (ed. 1846), 8.

H. G. WiNTERSGILL.

Humphreys, Laurence, layman and martyr, born in Hampshire, England, 1571; died at Wincliester, 1591. Of Protestant parentage, he was a studious youth, well read in the Bible and in religious works. At the age of eighteen he sought to enter the lists of religious controversy and had several meetings with Father Stanney, who soon succeeded in making him a convert. He was a virtuous and good-hearted youth, who delighted to visit prisoners and sick persons, to instruct the ignorant, and generally to exercise the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. In 1591 he was taken seriously ill, and in his delirium he called (^ueen Elizabeth a harlot and a heretic. He was over- heard by some Protestants, and before he was quite convalescent was arrested and committed to Winches- ter jail. At his trial he solemnly averred that he could not recollect having used opprobrious epithets about the queen, but that he did not dispute the evi- dence of the witnesses who had overheard him, and that he was willing to suffer for his words, though un- conscious of them. And for these words alone, spoken in delirium, he was condemned and executed.

Challoner, Memoirs (Edinburgh. 1S78), I, 278.

C. F. Wemyss Brown. Hu-nan, Northern, Southern. See Chin.v.

Hungarian Catholics in America. — The King- dom of Hungary (Magyarorszdg) comprises within its borders several races or nationalities other than the one from which it derives its name. Indeed the Hungarians are in the minority (or perhaps a bare majority) when contrasted with all the others com- bined; but they outnumber any one of the other races under the Hungarian frown. It therefore fre- quently happens that immigrants to the United States coming from the Kingdom of Hungary, no matter of what race they may be, are indiscriminately classed as Hungarians, even by persons fairly well informed. The Kingdom of Hungary, which is separate from Austria except in matters affecting foreign relations, comprises within its l)orders not only the Hvmgarians proper, Ijut also the Slovaks, Ruthenians, Rumanians, Slavonians, and Croatians, as well as a large number of Germans and some Italians. Representatives of all these races from the Hungarian Kingdom have emi- grated to America, and articles concerning them will be found under other headings. Those immigrants from Hungary who are of the Greek Rite, but who may be of Hungarian education and language, have already been mentioned in the article Greek Cath- olics IN America. This article is devoted to those immigrants who are of the Hungarian race and language and who are of the Roman Rite. Their mother tongue is of Asiatic origin and is quite unlike any of the Indo-European languages in its vocabu- lary, structure, and grammatical forms. All its deriv- ative words are made up from its own roots and for the most part are wholly native. Although it is sur- rounded and touched in social and business inter- course on every side by the various Slavonic tongues and by the Italian, German, and Rumanian languages, besides having the church liturgy and university teaching in Latin, the Hungarian (Magyar) language has nothing in it resembling any of them and has borrowed little or nothing from their various vocab- ularies. It remains isolated, almost without a rela- tive in the realm of European linguistics. This bar- rier of language has rendered it exceedingly difficult for the Hungarian immigrant to acquire the English language and thereby readily assimilate American VII.— 35


ideas and customs. Notwithstanding this drawback the Hungarian Americans have made progress of which every one may well be proud. Although Count Beldy and his three companions, Boloni, WesseMnyi, and Balogh settled in, America in 1831, immigra- tion to the United States from Hungary may be said to have set in, after the revolution of 1848-49 in Hungary, by the coming of Louis Kossuth to the United States in December, 1851, on the warship Mississippi, after the failure of his struggle for Hun- garian liberties. He was accompanied by fifty of his compatriots and many of these remained and settled in various parts of the country. During the Civil War and the wars between Germany and Austria, more and more Hungarian immigrants arrived, but they were then for the most part reckoned as Austrians.

It was not until 1880 that the Hungarian immi- gration really set in. Between 1880 anil 1898 about 200,000 Hungarians came to America. The reports of the Commissioner of Immigration show that the number of Hungarian (Magvar) immigrants from the year 1899 to July, 1909, amounted to 310,869. The greatest migration year v,as 1907, when 60,071 arrived. There are now about three-quarters of a million of them in the United States. They are scattered throughout the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and fill every walk in life. This immigration, while caused in a great measure by an effort to better the condition of the Hungarian of humbler circum- stances, has been largely stimulated by the agencies of the various European steamship companies, who have found it a paying business to spread tales of easily earned riches among dissatisfied Hungarian labourers. Peculiar political conditions, poverty among the agricultural classes, and high taxes have contributed to cause such immigration. But it can- not be said that a desire to emigrate to other lands is natural to the real Hungarian, for his country is not in the least overcrowded and its natural resources are sufficient to afford a decent livelihood for all its children. There are but few Hungarians emigrating from the southern, almost wholly Magyar, counties. They come either from the large cities or from lo- calities where the warring racial struggles make the search for a new home desirable. While a very large part of this immigration to the United States is Catholic, yet the combined Protestant, Jewish, and indifferentist Hungarian immigrants outnumber them, so that the Catholics number not quite one-half of the total. The Hungarians in the City of New York are said to number over 100,000. They are numerous in New Jersey and C'onneeticut; and every city, mining town, iron works, and factory village in Pennsylvania has a large contingent; probably a third of the Hun- garian population resides in that State. Cleveland and Chicago both have a very large Hungarian popu- lation, and they are scattered in every mining and manufacturing centre throughout Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, while West Virginia has numbers of them in its mining districts.

For a long time after the Hungarian immigration began no attention was paid, from the racial stand- point, to their spiritual needs as Catholics. They wor- shipped at German and Slavic churches and were undistinguishable from the mass of other foreign Catholics. During the eighties their spiritual welfare was occasionally looked after by priests of the Slavic nationalities in the larger American cities, for they could often speak Htingarian and thus get in touch with the people. About 1891 Bishop Horstmann of Cleveland secured for the Magyars of his city a Hungarian priest. Rev. Charles Bohm, who was sent there at his request by the Bishop of Vdc to take charge of them. The year 1892 marks the starting-point of an earnest missionary effort among the Hungarian Catholics in this country. Father Bohm's name is con- nected with every temporal and spiritual effort for the