water against every
great misfortune, which in former centuries rushed over Europe from the
East. It is not only the Turks, when they were yet a dangerous,
conquering race, which my nation had to stay, by wading to the very lips
in its own heroic blood. No. The still more terrible invasion of Batu
Khan's (the Mongol) raging millions, poured down over Europe from the
Steppes of Tartary,--who came not to conquer but to destroy, and
therefore spared not nature, not men, not the child in its mother's
womb. It was Hungary which had to stay its flood from devouring the rest
of Europe. Nevertheless, all which Hungary has ever suffered is far
less than it has to suffer now from the tyrant of Austria, himself in
his turn nothing but the slave of ambitious Russia.

Oh! it is a fair, beautiful land, my beloved country, rich in nature's
blessings as perhaps no land is rich on earth. When the spring has
strewn its blossoms over it, it looks as the garden of Eden may have
looked, and when the summer ripens nature's ocean of crops over its
hills and plains, it looks like a table dressed for mankind by the Lord
himself; and still it was here in Columbus that I read the news that a
terrible dearth, that famine is spreading over the rich and fertile
land. How should it not? Where life-draining oppression weighs so
heavily, that the landowner offers the use of all his lands to the
government, merely to get free from the taxation--where the vintager
cuts down his vineyards and the gardener his orchard, and the farmer
burns his tobacco seed to be rid of the duties, and their
vexations--there of course must dearth prevail, and famine raise its
hideous head. Yet the tyrant adds calumny to oppression, by attributing
the dearth to a want of industry, after having created it by oppression.
There exists no personal security of property. Nor is the verdict "not
guilty," when pronounced by an Austrian court, sufficient to ensure
security against prison, nay, against death by the executioner--through
a new trial ordered to find a man guilty at any price. Poor Louis
Bathyanyi was thus treated. Even now persecution is going on--hundreds
are arrested secretly and sent to prison and their property confiscated,
though they were already acquitted by the very Haynaus. _Even to whisper
that a man or woman was arrested in the night is considered a crime_,
and punished by prison, or if the whisperer be a young man, by sending him
to the army, there to taste,