necessary to conceal the real
motives of their perfidious conduct from the civilized world. Hence in
their public proclamations they always alleged some pretext or
other--all of them equally groundless. At the commencement they said
that it was only an insignificant faction they had to deal with; but
when they saw that the whole nation was arrayed in arms against them,
they declared it was for the suppression of demagogueism, propagated by
foreigners, chiefly Poles, that their armies had entered Hungary; and to
give a colour to this pretext they industriously spread the report that
there were 20,000 Poles in the ranks of the Hungarians. When however it
became notorious that no more than 1,000 Poles were fighting under our
national standard, the Austrian dynasty appeared as the
_soi-disant_ champion and judge of the various nationalities or
races. This answered well enough until the system of centralization
showed too clearly that an attempt would be made to Germanize these
nationalities; when the dynasty again veered about, and, leaving
"nationalities" in the lurch, took up the peasantry. We consequently
find the Austrian Government assuring the Washington Cabinet (in the
note of July 4, 1851) that they had waged war on Hungary in order to
crush a turbulent aristocracy that "preach democracy with their tongues,
while their whole lives consist in the daily exercise over their
fellow-men of arbitrary power in the most repugnant form." This last
pretext, so ostentatiously put forth, loses, however, even its
plausibility when contrasted with the policy of the dynasty in 1848, for
it is an undoubted fact that, although the reforms effected in our
_political_ institutions at that period were consented to by the
dynasty without much hesitation, it required the most energetic
remonstrances on the part of the Diet to obtain the Royal sanction to
the act for the liberation of the peasants from feudal bondage.

It is precisely to the fact of all classes, without distinction, being
equally aware of the cabals of the dynasty, that may be ascribed the
success of the Hungarian insurrection. It was not _one_ man, nor a
party, nor a conspiracy, nor terrorism, that awakened that spontaneous
enthusiasm with which the people rushed to arms. Kossuth may have been
the rallying cry; but he was not the cause of the war. For several
months the people had witnessed the equivocal conduct of the dynasty;
had seen that its words were belied by its