Our third particular claim is the behaviour of our ladies during the last war.  It is no arbitrary praise—­it is a fact,—­that, in the struggle for our rights and freedom, we had no more powerful auxiliaries, and no more faithful executors of the will of the nation, than the women of Hungary.  You know that in ancient Rome, after the battle of Cannae, which was won by Hannibal, the Senate called on the people spontaneously to sacrifice all their wealth on the altar of their fatherland.  Every jewel, every ornament was brought forth, but still the tribune judged it necessary to pass a law prohibiting the ladies of Rome to wear more than half an ounce of gold, or particoloured splendid dresses.  Now, we wanted in Hungary no such law.  The women of Hungary brought all that they had.  You would have been astonished to see how, in the most wealthy houses of Hungary, if you were invited to dinner, you would be forced to eat soup with iron spoons.  When the wounded and the sick—­and many of them we had, because we fought hard—­when the wounded and the sick were not so well provided as it would have been our duty and our pleasure to do, I ordered the respective public functionaries to take care of them.  But the poor wounded went on suffering, and the proper officers were but slow in providing for them.  When I saw this, one single word was spoken to the ladies of Hungary, and in a short time there was provision made for hundreds of thousands of sick.  And I never met a single mother who would have withheld her son from sharing in the battle; but I have met many who ordered and commanded their children to fight for their fatherland.  I saw many and many brides who urged on the bridegrooms to delay their day of happiness till they should come back victorious from the battles of their fatherland.  Thus acted the ladies of Hungary.  A country deserves to live; a country deserves to have a future, when the women, as much as the men, love and cherish it.

But I have a stronger motive than all these to claim your protecting sympathy for my country’s cause.  It is her nameless woe, nameless sufferings.  In the name of that ocean of bloody tears which the impious hand of the tyrant wrung from the eyes of the childless mothers, of the brides who beheld the executioner’s sword between them and their wedding day—­in the name of all these mothers, wives, brides, daughters, and sisters, who, by thousands of thousands, weep over the graves of Magyars so dear to their hearts,—­who weep the bloody tears of a patriot (as they all are) over the face of their beloved native land—­in the name of all those torturing stripes with which the flogging hand of Austrian tyrants dared to outrage human nature in the womankind of my native land—­in the name of that daily curse against Austria with which even the prayers of our women are mixed—­in the name of the nameless sufferings of my own dear wife [here the whole audience rose and cheered vehemently]—­the faithful companion of my life,—­of her, who