the glorious mark, POPULAR EDUCATION.  This is your proudest monument.  In my opinion, not your geographical situation, not your material power, not the bold enterprizing spirit of your people, is the chief guarantee of their future; but the universality of education:  for a whole people, once become intelligent, never can consent not to be free.  You will always be willing to be free, and you are great and powerful enough to be as good as your will.

My humble prayers in my country’s cause I address to your entire nation:  but you, gentlemen, are the engineers through whom my cause must reach them.  It is therefore highly gratifying to me to see, not isolated men, but the powerful complex of the great word PRESS, granting me this important manifestation of generous sentiment.  I beg you to consider, that whatever and wherever I speak, is always spoken to the press; and for all the imperfections of my language let me plead for your indulgence, as one of your professional colleagues:  for indeed such I have been.

Yes, gentlemen; I commenced my public career as a journalist.  You, under your happy institutions, know not the torment of writing with hands fettered by an Austrian censor.  To sit at the desk, with a heart full of the necessity of the moment, a conscience stirred with righteous feeling, a mind animated with convictions and principles, and a whole soul warmed by a patriot’s fire;—­to see before your eyes the scissors of the censor ready to lop your ideas, maim your arguments, murder your thoughts, render vain your laborious days and sleepless nights;—­to know that the people will judge you, not by what you have felt, thought, written, but by what the censor will let you say;—­to perceive that the prohibition has no rule or limit but the arbitrary pleasure of a man who is doomed by profession to be a coward and a fool;—­oh! his little scissors suspended over one are a worse misery than the sword of Damocles.  Oh! to go on, day by day, in such a work of Sisyphus, believe me, is no small sacrifice of any intelligent man to fatherland and humanity.  And this is the present condition of the press, not in Hungary only, but in all countries cursed by Austrian rule.  Indeed, our recent reforms gave freedom of the press, not to my fatherland only, but indirectly to Vienna, Prague, Lemberg; in a word, to the whole empire of Austria and this must ensure your sympathy to us.  Contrariwise, the interference of Russia has crushed the press on the whole European continent.  Freedom of the press is incompatible with the preponderance of Russia, and with the very existence of the Austrian dynasty, the sworn enemy of every liberal thought.  This must engage your generous support to sweep away those tyrants, and to raise liberty where now foul oppression rules.