e
laws, the integrity, and the rights of the kingdom, under my Hungarian
crown."

The King made this solemn declaration on the 8th of September, and on
the 9th of September Jellachich crossed the Drave with 48,000 men to
wage war in the King's name on the Hungarian Diet and Ministry. The King
had, moreover, on _the 4th of September_, affixed his sign manual
to a letter or Royal mandate addressed to Jellachich, and revoking the
decree by which he had been deprived of his civil and military offices
and dignities. His Majesty, in this letter, also expressed his high
approbation of the Ban's conduct. By a Royal decree, dated October 3,
the constitution was suspended, martial law proclaimed, and Jellachich,
the rebel, appointed His Majesty's Plenipotentiary Commissary for the
kingdom of Hungary, and invested with unlimited authority to act, in the
name of His Majesty, within the said kingdom.

Hungary, so far from commencing the revolution, was not even prepared to
meet the invasion of the Croatian Ban. He was defeated near
Stuhlweissenburg by the Landsturm. The Hungarian Government only began
to organize regular troops in October.

That the Diet did not recognize a decree that suspended the constitution
and invested Jellachich with the dictatorship, will be found quite
natural, if not by you, at least by every Englishman who cherishes
constitutional freedom, the more so as its proceedings on this occasion
were founded on legal right, viz., on act 4, sect. 6, of 1847-8, which
expressly ordains that "the annual session of the Diet shall not be
closed, nor the Diet itself dissolved, before the budget for the ensuing
year has been voted."

From this short but faithful account of what actually occurred, it
clearly appears that the Hungarian nation had not recourse to arms until
the Ban of Croatia entered the Hungarian territory with an
Austrian-Croatian army. It is also an undeniable fact that until the
promulgation of the Austrian Charter in March, 1849--by which, with a
stroke of the pen, the independence of Hungary was destroyed, its
constitution abolished, and its territories dismembered--the Hungarian
nation never demanded anything else than the maintenance of the laws and
institutions which its Sovereign had sanctioned and sworn to maintain
inviolate. It was however precisely for the purpose of destroying these
laws and institutions that the dynasty began the war. This, of course,
they did not venture to avow. It was