We have raised 120 million gallons of wine.  Gentlemen, I come not to interfere with the domestic concerns of America.  I have no opinion about the Maine liquor-law.  For myself I am very fond of water, but still may say it is my opinion, it will be many years before the Maine liquor-law will pass through all Europe.  Well, gentlemen, I was about to say, one half of the vineyards are cut down;—­hundreds of thousands live upon horticulture and fruit cultivation; yet the trees are cut down to escape the heavy taxation laid upon them.  The stamp tax is introduced, the most insupportable to freemen—­village is divided from village, town from town, city from city, by custom-lines—­the poor peasant woman, bringing a dozen of eggs to the market, has to pay the consumption-tax, before she is permitted to enter; and when she brings medicine home for her sick child she has again to pay before permitted to enter her home.

And besides this material oppression, and the daily and nightly vexations connected with it,—­the Protestants deprived of the self-government of their church and school, for which they have thrice taken up arms victoriously in three centuries,—­the Roman Catholics deprived of the security of their church property,—­the people of every race deprived of its nationality, because there exists no public life wherein to exert it, no national existence, no constitution, no municipalities, no native law, no native officials, no security of person and of property, but arbitrary power, martial law, and the hangman and the jail,—­and on the other side Hungarian patriotism, Hungarian honour, Hungarian heroism, Hungarian vitality, stamped in the vicissitudes of one thousand years, and the consciousness that we have beaten Austria, when we had no army, no money, no friends, and the knowledge that now we have an army, and for home purposes have money in the safe-guarded bank notes, and have America for a friend; and in addition to all this, the confidence of my people in my exertions, and the knowledge of these exertions; of which my people is quite as well informed as yourselves, nay, more, because it sees and knows what I do at home, whereas you see only what I do here—­well, if with all this you still doubt about the struggle in Europe being nigh, and still despair of its chance of success, then God be merciful to my poor brains, I know not what to think.

Some here take me for a visionary.  Curious, indeed, if that man who, a poor son of the people, took the lead in abolishing feudal injustices a thousand years old, created a currency of millions in a moneyless nation, and suddenly organized armies out of untrained masses of civilians; directed a revolution so as to fix the attention of the whole world upon Hungary, beat the old, well-provided power of Austria, and crushed its future by his very fall, and forsaken, abandoned, in his very exile is feared by Czars and Emperors, and trusted by foreign nations as well as his own—­if that man be a visionary, then for so much pride I may be excused that I would like to look face to face into the eyes of a practical man on earth.