Select Speeches of Kossuth eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 535 pages of information about Select Speeches of Kossuth.

Select Speeches of Kossuth eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 535 pages of information about Select Speeches of Kossuth.

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 bankruptcy impending,—­this indemnification Austria never can pay to the former aristocracy of Hungary.  The only means to get this indemnification is the restoration of Hungary to its independence by a new revolution.  Independent Hungary can pay it, because it has no debts, will want no large standing armies, and will have a cheap administration, because not centralized, but municipal, the people governing itself in and through municipalities, the cheapest of all governments.

Hungary has already pointed out the fund, out of which that indemnification can and will be paid, without any imposition upon the people, or any loss to the commonwealth.  Hungary has large State lands, belonging to and administered by the commonwealth.  I have mathematically proved that the landed property of the State, sold in small parcels to those who have yet no land, connected with a banking operation founded upon that property itself, to facilitate the payment of the price, is more than sufficient for that indemnification; besides, a small land tax (which the new owners of that immense property, divided into small farms, will have to pay, as other landed proprietors), will yield more revenue to the Commonwealth than all the proceeds of domestic administration.

This my proposition, having been submitted to the National Assembly, was accepted and approved, and has attached to the Revolution the numerous class of farm-labourers who have not yet their own farms, but who contemplated with the liveliest joy this benevolent provision, which Austria can never execute; since, financially ruined as she is, she cannot be contented either with the tax revenue or the banking arrangement, to defray the indemnification; she sells the stock whenever she can find a man to buy it.

But here is a remarkable fact, proving how little is the future of Austria contemplated as sure even by its votaries.  When any one is willing to sell landed property in Hungary, foreign bankers, Austrian capitalists buy it readily at an enormous price, because they know that private transactions will be respected by our revolution; but from the Government, nobody buys a single acre of land, because every man knows that such a transaction must be considered void.  Nay more, not even as a gift is an estate accepted by any one from the present government.  Haynau himself was offered in reward a large landed property by the government; he did not accept it, but preferred a comparatively small sum of money, not amounting to one-tenth of the value of the offered land, and he bought from a private individual a landed property, for the money, because that, being a private transaction, is sure to stand:  whereas in the future of the Austrian government in Hungary not even its Haynaus have confidence.

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Select Speeches of Kossuth from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.