Some time back there appeared in certain New York papers systematic falsehoods, which went so far as to state that we, the Hungarians, had struggled for oppression, while it was the Austrian dynasty which stood up for liberty!  Such effrontery astonishes even one who has seen Russian treacheries.  We may be misrepresented, scorned, jeered at, censured.  Our martyrs, whose blood cries for revenge, may be laughed at as fools.  Heroes, who will command the veneration of history, may be called Don Quixotes.  But that among freemen and professed republicans even the honour of an unfortunate nation, in its most mournful suffering, should not be sacred,—­that is indeed a sorrowful page in human history.

You cannot expect me to enter into a special refutation of this compound of calumnies.  I may reserve it for my pen.  But inasmuch as the basis of all the calumnies lies in general ignorance concerning the relation of the Magyars to other races of Hungary, permit me to speak on the question of NATIONALITIES, a false theory of which plays so mischievous a part in the destinies of Europe.  No word has been more misrepresented than the word Nationality, which is become in the hands of absolutism a dangerous instrument against liberty.

Let me ask you, gentlemen:  are you, the people of the United States, a nation, or not?  Have you a national government, or not?  You answer, yes:  and yet you are not all of one blood, nor of one language.  Millions of you speak English; others French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, and even several Indian dialects:  yet you are a nation.  Neither your central government, nor those of separate states, nor your municipalities, legislate or administer in every language spoken among you; yet you have a national government.

Now, suppose many of you were struck with the curse of Babel, and exclaimed, “This union is an oppression! our laws, our institutions, our state and city governments, are an oppression!  What is union to us? what are rights? what avail laws? what is freedom? what is geography? what is community of interests to us?  They are all nothing; LANGUAGE is everything.  Let us divide the Union, divide the states, divide the very cities, divide the whole territory, according to languages.  Let the people of every language become a separate state:  for every nation has a right to national life, and to us, the language, and nothing else, is the nationality.  Unless the state is founded upon language, its organization is tyranny.”

What then would become of your great Union?  What of your constitution, the glorious legacy of your greatest man?  What of those immortal stars on mankind’s moral sky?  What would become of your country itself, whence the spirit of freedom soars into light, and rising hope irradiates the future of humanity?  What would become of this grand, mighty complex of your republic, should her integrity ever be rent by the fanatics of language?  Where