now she walks among the rising temples of liberty and happiness, she soon would tread upon ruins, and mourn over human hopes.  But happy art then, free nation of America, founded on the only solid basis,—­liberty! a principle steady as the world, eternal as the truth, universal for every climate, for every time, like Providence.  Tyrants are not in the midst of you to throw the apple of discord and raise hatred in this national family, hatred of races, that curse of humanity, that venomous ally of despotism.  Glorious it is to see the oppressed of diverse countries,—­diverse in language, history, habits,—­wandering to these shores, and becoming members of this great nation, regenerated by the principle of common liberty.

If language alone makes a nation, then there is no great nation on earth:  for there is no country whose population is counted by millions, but speaks more than one language.  No!  It is not language only.  Community of interests, of rights, of duties, of history, but chiefly community of institutions; by which a population, varying perhaps in tongue and race, is bound together through daily intercourse in the towns, which are the centres and home of commerce and industry:—­besides these, the very mountain-ranges, the system of rivers and streams,—­the soil, the dust of which is mingled with the mortal remains of those ancestors who bled on the same field, for the same interests, the common inheritance of glory and of woe, the community of laws and institutions, common freedom or common oppression:—­all this enters into the complex idea of Nationality.

That this is instinctively felt by the common sense of the people, nowhere is more manifestly shown than at this very moment in my native land.  Hungary was declared by Francis Joseph of Austria no more to exist as a Nation, no more as a State.  It was and is put under martial law.  Strangers, aliens to our laws and history as well as to our tongue, rule now, where our fathers lived and our brothers bled.  To be a Hungarian is become almost a crime in our own native land.  Well:  to justify before the world the extinction of Hungary, the partition of its territory, and the reincorporating of the dissected limbs into the common body of servitude, the treacherous dynasty was anxious to show that the Hungarians are in a minority in their own land.  They hoped that intimidation and terrorism would induce even the very Magyars to disavow their language and birth.  They ordered a census of races to be made.  They performed it with the iron rule of martial law; and dealt so arbitrarily that thousands of women and men, who professed to be Magyars, who professed not to know any other language than the Magyar, were, notwithstanding all their protestation, put down as Sclaves, Serbs, Germans, or Wallachians, because their names had not quite a Hungarian sound.  And still what was the issue of this malignant plot?  That of the twelve millions of inhabitants of Hungary proper, the Magyars