What is the sum of all this?  First, that there is nothing in the news from France to alter any judgments which you might previously have formed, or cause you any suspense.  Secondly, it only more than ever claims from you an immediately decisive conduct.  The success of freedom now depends entirely on what policy the United States of America will adopt.

Well! gentlemen.  It may be that the United States have no reply to the hopes of the world.  You will then see a mournful tear in the eye of humanity, and its breast heaving with sighs.  We presume, you are so powerful that you can afford not to care about the treading down of the law of nations and the funeral of European freedom.  You are so glorious at home, that you can afford to lose the glory (at so rare a crisis!) of saving liberty and justice on earth.  Yet in your own hour of trial you asked and received military and naval aid from France.  Your President has informed the world, that you are not willing to allow “the strong arm of a foreign power to suppress the spirit of freedom in any country.”  If after this you tell me that you are afraid of Russia, and are too weak to help us,—­and would rather be on good terms with the Czar, than rejoice in the liberty and independence of Hungary, Italy, Germany, France,—­dreadful as it would be, I would wipe away my tear, and say to my brethren, “Let us pray, and let us go to the Lord’s Last Supper, and thence to battle and to death.”  I would then leave you, gentlemen, with a dying farewell, and with a prayer that the sun of freedom may never drop below the horizon of your happy land.

I am in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, the city of William Penn, whose likeness I saw this day in a history of your city, with this motto under it:  “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—­(prepare for war, if thou wilt have peace)—­a weighty memento, gentlemen, to the name of William Penn.

And I am in that city which is the cradle of your independence—­where, in the hour of your need, the appeal was proclaimed to the Law of Nature’s God, and that appeal for help from Europe, which was granted to you.

I stood in Independence Hall, whence the spirit of freedom lisps eternal words of history to the secret recesses of your hearts.  Man may well be silent where from such a place history so speaks.  So my task is done—­with me the pain, with you the decision—­and, let me add the prophetic words of the poet, “the moral of the strain.”

Kossuth took his seat amid the three times three of the audience.

* * * * *

XV.—­INTEREST OF AMERICA IN HUNGARIAN LIBERTY.

[Baltimore, Dec. 27th.]

On the 27th December Kossuth reached Baltimore, and was met by an immense concourse of citizens and a long line of military, who escorted him to his quarters with much enthusiastic demonstration.  In the evening he addressed the citizens in the Hall of the Maryland Institute, which was densely crowded, great numbers standing outside the building, when unable to get admittance.