religion than the Bishops of Hungary? Our battalions
were filled with Roman Catholic volunteers; Catholic priests led their
faithful flocks to the battle field; our National Convention was
composed in majority of Catholics--all the Catholic population, without
any exception, consented to and cheered enthusiastically my being
elected Governor of Hungary, though I am a Protestant. I had and I have
their friendship, their devotion, their support; and when I formed the
first Ministry of Independent Hungary, not only a full half of the new
Ministry I entrusted to Roman Catholics, but especially I nominated a
Roman Catholic Bishop to be Minister of public instruction, and all the
Protestants of my country hailed the nomination with applause. Such is
the cause of Hungary. Who dares now to charge me that that cause is
hostile to the Roman Catholic religion?

But I am allied with Mazzini, with the Romans, and with the Italians;
thus goes on the charge: and these cursed Italians are enemies to the
Pope. Not to the Pope as High Priest of the Roman Catholic Church, but
as despotic sovereign of Rome and his corrupted temporal government--the
worst of human inventions. How long has it been a principle of the Roman
Catholic religion, that the Romans should not be Republicans? and that
the high priest of the Roman church should be a despotic sovereign over
the Roman nation? and in that capacity be a devoted ally and obedient
servant to the Czar of Russia, the sworn enemy and bloody persecutor of
Roman Catholicism? Why, when in 1849, the French Republic sent an army
against the Roman Republic to restore the Pope, not to his spiritual
authority, because that was by nobody contradicted, but to his temporal
despotism, the whole danger could have been averted by the Romans by
becoming, _en masse_, Protestants. The idea was pronounced in Rome
and not a single Roman accepted it. They preferred to struggle without
hope of victory--they preferred to bleed and to die rather than to
abandon their faith.

Now, who can dare to insult that people--who can dare to insult the
Roman Catholics of Hungary, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Poland, France--who
can dare to insult the thousands of thousands of Roman citizens of the
United States--Senators, Governors, Judges--men of all public and
private positions--who can dare to insult them, as hostile to their own
religion, because they unite to support that cause which I plead? And
because they side with repub