istorical fact, as a principal demonstration of
that influence which institutions exercise upon the character of
nations.

We Hungarians are very fond of the principle of municipal
self-government, and we have a natural horror against centralization.
That fond attachment to municipal self-government, without which there
is no provincial freedom possible, is a fundamental feature of our
national character. We brought it with us from far Asia a thousand
years ago, and we preserved it throughout the vicissitudes of ten
centuries. No nation has perhaps so much struggled and suffered for the
civilized Christian world as we. We do not complain of this lot. It may
be heavy, but it is not inglorious. Where the cradle of our Saviour
stood, and where His divine doctrine was founded, there now another
faith rules: the whole of Europe's armed pilgrimage could not avert this
fate from that sacred spot, nor stop the rushing waves of Islamism from
absorbing the Christian empire of Constantine. _We_ stopped those
rushing waves. The breast of my nation proved a breakwater to them. We
guarded Christendom, that Luthers and Calvins might reform it. It was a
dangerous time, and its dangers often placed the confidence of all my
nation into one man's hand. But there was not a single instance in our
history where a man honoured by his people's confidence deceived them
for his own ambition. The man out of whom Russian diplomacy succeeded in
making a murderer of his nation's hopes, gained some victories when
victories were the chief necessity of the moment, and at the head of an
army, circumstances gave him the ability to ruin his country; but he
never had the people's confidence. So even he is no contradiction to the
historical truth, that no Hungarian whom his nation honoured with its
confidence was ever seduced by ambition to become dangerous to his
country's liberty. That is a remarkable fact, and yet it is not
accidental; it springs from the proper influence of institutions upon
the national character. Our nation, through all its history, was
educated in the school of local self-government; and in such a country,
grasping ambition having no field, has no place in man's character.

The truth of this doctrine becomes yet more illustrated by a quite
contrary historical fact in France. Whatever have been the changes of
government in that great country--and many they have been, to be
sure--we have seen a Convention, a Directorate, Consuls, and