From this short but faithful account of what actually occurred, it clearly appears that the Hungarian nation had not recourse to arms until the Ban of Croatia entered the Hungarian territory with an Austrian-Croatian army.  It is also an undeniable fact that until the promulgation of the Austrian Charter in March, 1849—­by which, with a stroke of the pen, the independence of Hungary was destroyed, its constitution abolished, and its territories dismembered—­the Hungarian nation never demanded anything else than the maintenance of the laws and institutions which its Sovereign had sanctioned and sworn to maintain inviolate.  It was however precisely for the purpose of destroying these laws and institutions that the dynasty began the war.  This, of course, they did not venture to avow.  It was necessary to conceal the real motives of their perfidious conduct from the civilized world.  Hence in their public proclamations they always alleged some pretext or other—­all of them equally groundless.  At the commencement they said that it was only an insignificant faction they had to deal with; but when they saw that the whole nation was arrayed in arms against them, they declared it was for the suppression of demagogueism, propagated by foreigners, chiefly Poles, that their armies had entered Hungary; and to give a colour to this pretext they industriously spread the report that there were 20,000 Poles in the ranks of the Hungarians.  When however it became notorious that no more than 1,000 Poles were fighting under our national standard, the Austrian dynasty appeared as the soi-disant champion and judge of the various nationalities or races.  This answered well enough until the system of centralization showed too clearly that an attempt would be made to Germanize these nationalities; when the dynasty again veered about, and, leaving “nationalities” in the lurch, took up the peasantry.  We consequently find the Austrian Government assuring the Washington Cabinet (in the note of July 4, 1851) that they had waged war on Hungary in order to crush a turbulent aristocracy that “preach democracy with their tongues, while their whole lives consist in the daily exercise over their fellow-men of arbitrary power in the most repugnant form.”  This last pretext, so ostentatiously put forth, loses, however, even its plausibility when contrasted with the policy of the dynasty in 1848, for it is an undoubted fact that, although the reforms effected in our political institutions at that period were consented to by the dynasty without much hesitation, it required the most energetic remonstrances on the part of the Diet to obtain the Royal sanction to the act for the liberation of the peasants from feudal bondage.