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.

[Kossuth proceeded, in assent to a special request, to give his advice as to the method of proceeding suitable to the German voters in America; and closed by saying:]

Those are the principles, my dear friends, which should lead you, according to my humble opinion, in the present crisis.  And if you take into kind consideration my bequest, and exert your influence and active aid on behalf of the movement for freedom in Europe, I can but assure you, for my grateful farewell, that there are hundreds of thousands in Europe who take those words for their device, which the other day, the German singers sang, as if from the depth of my heart.

  “And never shall rest the shield and the spear,
  Till destroyed we see, and laid in the dust,
  The enemies all.”

May God help me!  This is my oath, and this oath my farewell!

* * * * *

LII.—­THE FUTURE OF NATIONS.

[A Lecture in New York.]

The following Lecture was delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle by request of a large number of ladies and gentlemen of New York, for the purpose of obtaining the means necessary to secure to the exiled family of Kossuth, consisting of his aged mother, his sisters and their children, an establishment by which they might earn an independent livelihood.

The New York ‘Evening Post’ says of the Lecture:—­

“Kossuth appears nowhere greater than in this able discourse.  His comprehensive politics, his beautiful sympathies, his power over language, his poetic imagination, his magnetic and melting earnestness of purpose, are blended with that depth of religious feeling which gives to his character as a patriot the sanctity and unction of the prophet.  His moral and intellectual faculties are shown in harmony, working out the great and beneficent purposes of his commanding will.

“It would be difficult to select any portion of this speech as better than another, and we therefore commend the whole to the reader’s careful examination.”

Ladies and gentlemen,—­During six months I appeared many times before the tribunal of public opinion in America.  This evening I appear before you in the capacity of a working man.  My aged mother, tried by more sufferings than any living being on earth, and my three sisters, one of them a widow with two fatherless orphans, together a homeless family of fourteen unfortunate souls, have been driven by the Austrian tyrant from their home, that Golgotha of murdered right, that land of the oppressed, but also of undesponding braves, and the land of approaching revenge.  When Russian violence, aided by domestic treason, succeeded to accomplish what Austrian perjury could not achieve, and I with bleeding heart went into exile, my mother and all my sisters were imprisoned by Austria; but it having been my constant maxim not to allow to whatever member of my family any influence in public affairs, except that I intrusted to the

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Select Speeches of Kossuth from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.