There is a combined effort in Continental Europe to overthrow all free and liberal institutions.  This accomplished, what next?—­The efforts of tyrants will be directed to our institutions.  It will be their aim to break us down.  Must not we prevent this event—­peaceably if we can—­forcibly if we must? No power will prevail with tyrants and usurpers but the power of gunpowder or steel.

Kossuth in reply, turning to Governor Wood, said:  Before addressing the assembly, I humbly entreat your excellency to permit me to express, out of the very heart of my heart, my gratitude and fervent thanks for those lofty, generous principles which you have been pleased now to pronounce.  I know those principles would have immense value even if they were only an individual opinion; but when they are expressed by him who is the elect of the people of Ohio, they doubly, manifoldly increase in weight.

The restoration of Hungary to its national independence is my aim, to which I the more cheerfully devote my life, because I know that my nation, once master of its own destiny, can make no other choice, in the regulation of its institutions and of its government, than that of a Republic founded upon democracy and the great principle of municipal self-government, without which, as opposed to centralization, there is no practical freedom possible.

Other nations enjoying a comparatively tolerable condition under their existing governments—­though aware of their imperfections, may shrink from a revolution of which they cannot anticipate the issue, while they know that in every case it is attended with great sacrifices and great sufferings for the generation which undertakes the hazard of the change.  But that is not the condition of Hungary.  My poor native land is in such a condition that all the horrors of a revolution, when without the hopes of happiness to be gained by it, are preferable to what it lives to endure now.  The very life on a bloody battle-field, where every whistling musket-ball may bring death—­affords more security, more ease, and is less alarming than that life which the people of Hungary has to suffer now.  We have seen many a sorrowful day in our past, We have been by our geographical position, destined as the breakwater against every great misfortune, which in former centuries rushed over Europe from the East.  It is not only the Turks, when they were yet a dangerous, conquering race, which my nation had to stay, by wading to the very lips in its own heroic blood.  No.  The still more terrible invasion of Batu Khan’s (the Mongol) raging millions, poured down over Europe from the Steppes of Tartary,—­who came not to conquer but to destroy, and therefore spared not nature, not men, not the child in its mother’s womb.  It was Hungary which had to stay its flood from devouring the rest of Europe.  Nevertheless, all which Hungary has ever suffered is far less than it has to suffer now from the tyrant of Austria, himself in his turn nothing but the slave of ambitious Russia.