ce, and of command, for which he was incompetent. The fact
was that he could not distinguish between the practicable and the
impracticable, and though not so visionary as Mazzini, he believed
that his power of arousing the wild enthusiasm of the Honveds and
masses of Hungarians, due to his marvelous eloquence, was enough to
carry on war with, and he would not see that, from the moment that
Russia intervened, it was only a question of time when and how the
insurrection should end. Then his treatment of the Slavonic element of
the population was fatal to the movement. The Serbs only asked to be
admitted on an equal footing with the Magyars to the struggle against
the centralizing tendency of the German element at Vienna, and
Kossuth contemptuously exclaimed, in response to their demand, "These
Rascians, who consider themselves a nation and are only a band of
robbers," etc.,--a reply hardly calculated to conciliate--one which in
fact threw the Slavonic population against the movement and made the
Russian intervention inevitable. Kossuth, like Mazzini, was simply an
insurrectionary force--the administrative power existed only in great
and imposing schemes which lacked adaptation to ordinary human nature
and existing circumstances. The personal fascination of the man was
beyond anything I have ever known, but his failure as the chief of a
state was, I believe, inevitable.

I took my conge as secret agent, but it was understood that when the
renewal of the revolt from Austria, to which he looked forward at no
distant time, was at hand, I should take the place to which I had
looked forward in the beginning. I saw one of Kossuth's associates
subsequently, after the failure of Mazzini's Milan movement in the
spring of 1853; and he then told me of the failure, and how the
Hungarian soldiers, as had been ordered, refused to fire on the
insurgents and had been decimated and sent to Croatia. More than
thirty years after, I went to see Kossuth at Turin, and introduced
myself as the young man who went to Hungary for him to carry off the
crown jewels. He burst out with an impetuous denial of the existence
of the expedition. "But," said I, "I have your letters written to
me in Pesth." "I should like to see those letters," he replied. I
promised to send them, conditionally on his promise to return them;
but thinking it over, I sent him only one, inclosed in a stamped
envelope directed to myself, with a letter recalling the promise to
se