Oh! it is a fair, beautiful land, my beloved country, rich in nature’s blessings as perhaps no land is rich on earth.  When the spring has strewn its blossoms over it, it looks as the garden of Eden may have looked, and when the summer ripens nature’s ocean of crops over its hills and plains, it looks like a table dressed for mankind by the Lord himself; and still it was here in Columbus that I read the news that a terrible dearth, that famine is spreading over the rich and fertile land.  How should it not?  Where life-draining oppression weighs so heavily, that the landowner offers the use of all his lands to the government, merely to get free from the taxation—­where the vintager cuts down his vineyards and the gardener his orchard, and the farmer burns his tobacco seed to be rid of the duties, and their vexations—­there of course must dearth prevail, and famine raise its hideous head.  Yet the tyrant adds calumny to oppression, by attributing the dearth to a want of industry, after having created it by oppression.  There exists no personal security of property.  Nor is the verdict “not guilty,” when pronounced by an Austrian court, sufficient to ensure security against prison, nay, against death by the executioner—­through a new trial ordered to find a man guilty at any price.  Poor Louis Bathyanyi was thus treated.  Even now persecution is going on—­hundreds are arrested secretly and sent to prison and their property confiscated, though they were already acquitted by the very Haynaus. Even to whisper that a man or woman was arrested in the night is considered a crime, and punished by prison, or if the whisperer be a young man, by sending him to the army, there to taste, when he dares to frown, the corporal’s stick. No man knows what is forbidden, what not, because there exists no law but the arbitrary will of martial courts—­no protecting institution—­no public life—­free speech forbidden—­the press fettered—­complaint a crime,—­When we consider all this, indeed it is not possible not to arrive at the conviction, that, come what may, a new war of revolution in Hungary is not a matter of choice, but a matter of unavoidable necessity, because all that may come is not by far so terrible as that which is!

But I am often asked,—­“What hope has Hungary should she rise again?” Pardon me, gentlemen, for saying, that I cannot forbear to be surprized as often as I hear this question.  Why!  The Emperor of Austria, fresh with his bloody victories over Italy, Vienna, Lemberg, Prague, attacked us in the fulness of his power, when we had no expectation, and were least in the world prepared to meet it.  We were assaulted on several sides; our fortresses were in the hands of traitors, we had as yet no army at all.  We were secluded from all the world—­forsaken by all the world—­without money—­without arms—­without ammunition—­without friends—­having nothing for us but the justice of our cause and the people burning with patriotism—­men who went to the battlefield almost without knowing how to cock their guns; but still, within less than six months, we beat all the force of Austria,—­we crushed it to the dust, and in despair, the proud tyrant fled to the feet of the Czar, begging his assistance for his sacrilegious purpose, and paying him by the sacrifice of honour, independence, and all his future!