large territory because one part of the inhabitants speak a different
tongue, and would claim from Hungary to divide its territory, which God
himself has limited by its range of mountains and the system of streams,
as also by all the links of a community of more than a thousand years;
to cut off our right hand, Transylvania, and to give it up to the
neighbouring Wallachia, to cut out like Shylock one pound of our very
breast--the Banat--and the rich country between the Danube and
Theiss--to augment by it Turkish Serbia and so forth. It is the new
ambition of conquest, but an easy conquest not by arms, but by language.

So much I know, at least, that this absurd idea cannot, and will not, be
advocated by any man here in the United States; which did not open its
hospitable shores to humanity, and greet the flocking millions of
emigrants with the right of a citizen, in order that the Union may be
cut to pieces, and even your single States divided into new-framed,
independent countries according to languages.

And do you know, gentlemen, whence this absurd theory sprang up on the
European Continent? It was the idea of Panslavismus--that is the idea
that the mighty stock of Sclavonic races is called to rule the world, as
once the Roman did. It was a Russian plot--it was a dark design to make
out of national feelings a tool to Russian preponderance over the world.

Perhaps you are not aware of the historical origin of this plot. It was
after that most immortal act of tyranny, the third division of Poland,
that the chance of fate brought the Prince Czartorinsky, to the Court of
Catherine of Russia. He subsequently became minister of Alexander the
Czar. It was in this quality that, with the noble aim to benefit his
fallen fatherland, he claimed from the young Czar the restoration of
Poland, suggesting for equivalent the idea of Russian preponderance over
all nations of the old Sclavonic race. I believe his intention was
sincere; I believe he did not mean to overlook those natural borders,
which, besides the affinity of language, God himself has drawn between
the nations. But he forgot that he might be no longer able to master
the spirits which he would raise, and that an undesired fanaticism might
force sundry fantastical shapes into his framework, by which the frame
itself must burst in pieces. He forgot that Russian preponderance cannot
be propitious to liberty; he forgot that it cannot be favourable even to
the development