Before these assurances, and upon the conditions of your destiny, I rely; and I venture humbly to advise you to strengthen your fleet in the Mediterranean.  Sir, look for a port of your own, not depending upon the smiles of petty Italian despots, but one where the stripes and stars of America will be able to protect the principles of FREE SHIPS, FREE GOODS.  Determine the character of your country’s future administration from a broad American view, and not from any petty considerations of small party follies.  With these humble suggestions I cordially thank you for your sympathy, and bid you an affectionate farewell!

* * * * *

L.—­RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.

[Utica.]

At Utica, in New York State, the elegant Saloon of the Museum was arranged for Kossuth’s reception:  and the Hon. W. Bacon made a powerful address to him.  Kossuth in the course of his reply, said:—­

Ladies and gentlemen,—­The history and the institutions of the United States were not only the favourite study of my life, from my early youth, strengthening my conviction that with centralization and with parliamentary omnipotence, which absorb all independence of municipal life, there is no practical freedom possible:—­but the history and institutions of the United States exerted also a real influence upon the resolution of my people to resist oppression, and not to shrink before the dangers and sacrifices of a terrible conflict.

Never yet was there a people against which all the arts of hell had been combined worse than against the people of Hungary in 1848.  Neither dreaming to attack any, nor suspecting to be attacked, never yet was a people less prepared for a war of defence, or more surprised by the danger than my country was.

In those frightful days, when many of the stoutest hearts prepared mourningly to submit to the imperious necessity, I called Hungary to arms; and while on the one side I pronounced a curse against those who would forsake the fatherland, and were willing to bow cowardlike before a sacrilegious violence, and accept the degradation of servitude,—­on the other side, in order to cheer up the manly resolution of my countrymen, I pointed to the heart-raising example of your history.  And that history became the guiding star to us, from the lustre of which we have drawn self-reliance and resolution to bear up against all danger and all adversities.

But while we on our part readily yielded to the heart-ennobling influence of your history, we were disappointed in some expectations which we derived from it.  We saw that you were not forsaken in the hour of need; yet your grievances were by far less heart-stirring than ours, and should you have failed in the noble enterprize of independence, such a failure, at that time, would by no means have teemed with such immediate results of positive mischiefs to the world outside of you, as every considerate mind might have foreseen from our fall.