the people, which, if it is really to be free, cannot
have any master but God. The old Anglo-Saxon municipal freedom has even
in England been weakened by this tendency; parliament has not only
fought against the prerogative of the crown, but has conquered the
municipal freedom of the country and of the borough. Green Erin sighs
painfully under this pressure, and English statesmen begin to be
alarmed. Hungary, my own dear fatherland, was the only country in Europe
which, amidst all adversaries, amidst all attacks of foreign
encroachment and all inducements of false new doctrines, remained
faithful to the great principle of self-government, at which the
perjurious dynasty of Austria has never ceased to aim deadly blows. To
get rid of these incessant attacks we availed ourselves of the condition
of Europe in 1848, and got our old national self-government guarantied
in a legal way, with the sanction of our then king, by substituting
_individual_ for collective responsibility of ministers; having
experienced that a board of ministers, though responsible by law and
composed of our own countrymen, was naturally and necessarily in
practice irresponsible. When the tyrants of Austria, whom our
forefathers had elected in an ill-fated hour to be our constitutional
kings, saw that their designs of centralization were obstructed, they
forsook their honour, they broke their oath, they tore asunder the
compact by which they had become kings; the diadem had lost its
brightness for them if it was not to be despotic.

They stirred up robbers and rebels against us: and when this failed,
then with all the forces of the empire attacked Hungary unexpectedly,
not thinking to meet with a serious opposition, because we had no army,
no arms, no ammunition, no money, no friends. They therefore declared
our constitution and our self-government, which we have preserved
through the adversities of ten centuries, at once and for ever
abolished.

But my heart could not bear this sacrilege. I and my political friends,
we called our people to arms to defend the palladium of our national
existence, the privilege of self-government, and that political, civil,
and religious liberty, and those democratic institutions, which, upon
the glorious basis of self-government, we had succeeded to assert for
all the people of Hungary. And the people nobly answered my call. We
struck down the centralizing tyrant to the dust; we drove him and his
double-faced eagle out