After accepting the recommendation, Teodor Onișor is speaking about the Settlement of 67, about the many and beautiful promises made to the Wallachians [Romanians] at the time, tax cuts, trimming back the number of clerks etc. Barely literate Onișor continues to read, launches against the onetime makers of these promises, that they did not deliver on any of them but placed a clerk in each village, before that 5 villages had only 1 clerk in total, lots of new offices were created, pensions were voted for them, all kinds of difficult tax laws were established, and then the government of 48 freed the people from serfdom, the government of 67, in spite of its promises, has driven the poor into misery. No one emigrated to Romania 43 years ago, but now even the Magyars themselves have to emigrate, just like the swallows; governments have been deaf and blind since 67, unaware of the plight of the working people; animals have a better fate (…)
His Majesty the King has commanded the government that the coalition should make the equal, secret vote by villages, which proves that the King has given the people rights, therefore “Long live the King” and “Long live the international social democracy”, the latter is cheered only by the speaker.

(the Brassó/Brașov/Kronstadt police chief’s report to Prefect/Lord-lieutenant (főispán) Zsigmond Mikes on 11 January 1910 about a meeting of the Romanian section of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary)

Teodor Onișor, regularly the eldest member of Romanian Social Democratic rallies, was at that time a lone advocate of socialism in Blaj, the seat of the Greek Catholic archdiocese and a centre of Romanian minority nationalism. He had previously been part of a delegation of peasants who travelled to Vienna to present with Francis Joseph the so-called Memorandum, which listed the grievances of Hungary’s Romanians. His take on the 1867 Ausgleich here is rather idiosyncratic, but his social views were widely shared by the peasantry.

 

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