turned out to be more than eight millions, some two millions more than we know the case really is.  The people instinctively felt that the tyrant had the design through the pretext of language to destroy the existence of the complex nation, and it met the tyrannic plot as if it answered, “We are, and must be, a nation; and if the tyrant takes language only for the mark of nationality, then we are all Magyars.”  And mark well, gentlemen! this happened, not under my governorship, but under the rule of Austrian martial law.  The Cabinet of Vienna became furious; it thought of a new census, but prudent men told them that a new census would give the whole twelve millions as Magyars; thus no new census was taken.

But on the European continent there unhappily has grown up a school, which bound the idea of nationality to the idea of language only, and joined political pretensions to it.  There are some who advocate the theory that existing States must cease, and the territories of the world be divided anew by languages and nations, separated by tongues.

You are aware that this idea, if it were not impracticable, would be a curse to humanity—­a deathblow to civilization and progress, and throw back mankind by centuries.  It would be an eternal source of strife and war:  for there is a holy, almost religious tie, by which man’s heart is bound to his home, and no man would ever consent to abandon his native land only because his neighbours speak another language than himself.  His heart claims that sacred spot where the ashes of his fathers lie—­where his own cradle stood—­where he dreamed the happy dreams of youth, and where nature itself bears a mark of his manhood’s toil.  The idea were worse than the old migration of nations was.  Nothing but despotism would rise out of such a fanatical strife of all mankind.

And really it is very curious.  Nobody of the advocates of this mischievous theory is willing to yield to it for himself—­but others he desires to yield to it.  Every Frenchman becomes furious when his Alsace is claimed to Germany by the right of language—­or the borders of his Pyrenees to Spain—­but there are some amongst the very men who feel revolted at this idea, who claim of Germany that it should yield up large territory because one part of the inhabitants speak a different tongue, and would claim from Hungary to divide its territory, which God himself has limited by its range of mountains and the system of streams, as also by all the links of a community of more than a thousand years; to cut off our right hand, Transylvania, and to give it up to the neighbouring Wallachia, to cut out like Shylock one pound of our very breast—­the Banat—­and the rich country between the Danube and Theiss—­to augment by it Turkish Serbia and so forth.  It is the new ambition of conquest, but an easy conquest not by arms, but by language.

So much I know, at least, that this absurd idea cannot, and will not, be advocated by any man here in the United States; which did not open its hospitable shores to humanity, and greet the flocking millions of emigrants with the right of a citizen, in order that the Union may be cut to pieces, and even your single States divided into new-framed, independent countries according to languages.