overnment has an ally in the mighty and
influential class of bankers, who lend their money to support despotism,
and in those who have invested their fortunes in the shares of these
loans, negotiated by bankers, who speculate on and with the fortunes of
small capitalists. That class of men, partly tools of oppression,
partly the fools of the tools, exists not in Hungary. We have no such
bankers in Hungary, and but a very small inconsiderable number who have
invested their fortunes in such loan-shares. And even the few who had
been playing in the fatal loan-share game have withdrawn from it, at any
price, because they feared to lose all. From that quarter therefore the
House of Austria has no ally in Hungary.

As to our former aristocracy, a class influential by its connections,
and by its large landed property: you remember that, when we succeeded
to abolish the feudal charges, and converted millions of our countrymen,
of different religion and different language, out of leaseholders into
free landed proprietors, we guaranteed an indemnification to the
landowners for what they lost. From a farm of about thirty-five to fifty
acres of land, the farmer had to work one hundred and two days a year
for the landowner; to give him the ninth part of all his crops, half a
dollar in ready money, besides particular fees for shopkeeping, brewery,
mill, &c. We freed the people from all the encumbrances, and, thanks to
God! that benefit never more can be torn from the people's hands. The
aristocracy consented to it, because we had guaranteed full
indemnification. The very material existence of this class of former
landowners is depending on that indemnification, to defray their debts,
(which they formerly had the habit wantonly to contract,) and to provide
for the cultivation of their own large allodial property, which they
formerly cultivated by the hands of their leaseholders, but now have to
invest capital into.

Now this indemnification, amounting to one hundred millions of dollars,
the House of Austria never can realize. You know, with its centralized
government, which is always very expensive, with its standing army of
600,000 men, the only support of its precarious existence, with its army
of spies and secret police, with its system of corruption and robbery,
with its fourteen hundred millions of debt, with its eternal deficit in
its current expenditures, with its new loans to pay the interest of the
old, and an unavoidable b