,
and give it in their stead to me." And there was a whisper around me
like the word "Amen." Such was my dream, half foresight and half
prophecy; but resolution all. However, none of those dead whom I saw,
fell on the 15th of March. They were victims of the royal perjury which
betrayed the 15th of March. The anniversary of our revolution has not
the stain of a single drop of blood.

We, the elect of the nation, sat on that morning busily but quietly in
the legislative hall of old Presburg, and without any flood of
eloquence, passed our laws in short words, that the people shall be
free; the burdens of feudality cease; the peasant become free
proprietor; that equality of duties, equality of rights, shall be the
fundamental law; and civil, political, social, and religious liberty,
the common property of all the people, whatever tongue it may speak, or
in whatever church pray, and that a national ministry shall execute
these laws, and guard with its responsibility the chartered ancient
independence of our Fatherland.

Two days before, Austria's brave people in Vienna had broken its yoke;
and summing up despots in the person of its tool, old Metternich, drove
him away, and the Hapsburgs, trembling in their imperial cavern of
imperial crimes, trembling, but treacherous, and lying and false, wrote
with yard-long letters, the words, "Constitution" and "Free Press," upon
Vienna's walls; and the people in joy cheered the inveterate liars,
because the people knows no falsehood.

On the 14th I announced the tidings from Vienna to our Parliament at
Presburg. The announcement was swiftly carried by the great democrat,
the steam-engine, upon the billows of the Danube, down to old Buda and
to young Pesth, and while we, in the House of Representatives, passed
the laws of justice and freedom, the people of Pesth rose in peaceful
but majestic manifestation, declaring that the people should be free. At
this manifestation, all the barriers raised by violence against the
laws, fell of themselves. Not a drop of blood was shed. A man who was in
prison because he had dared to write a book, was carried home in triumph
through the streets. The people armed itself as a National Guard, the
windows were illuminated, and bonfires burnt; and when these tidings
returned back to Presburg, blended with the cheers from Vienna, they
warmed the chill of our House of Lords, who readily agreed to the laws
we proposed. And there was rejoicing throughout th