After an apologetic introduction, Kossuth proceeded to say:—­

Gentlemen!  It is gratifying to me to receive this spontaneous welcome.  I was already grateful, during my stay in New York, to receive the expression of your sentiments, and your generous resolutions.  They become the more beneficial to me, because I am on my way and very near to Washington City, where the elected of your national confidence stand in their proud position, as conservators of those lofty interests, which bind your thirty-one stars of Sovereign States into one mighty constellation of Freedom, Power, and Right; where the Congress and Government of this vast Republic watch over the common weal of your united country, and hereby make you a Power on earth, a fullgrown member of that great Family of Nations, which, having One Father in heaven, are brethren, and should act as brethren.

Among the interests intrusted by you to the Congress and Government, your foreign policy is nearly the most important.  This, in a great and powerful nation, can have no other basis than Eternal Law and Christian Morality.  Even your peculiar interests are, in my belief, best served, when your foreign policy rests, not on transitory considerations, but on everlasting principles.  Even in private life no man can entirely cut himself off from others.  A man willing to attempt it would be an exile in his own country, an exile in his own city, an exile in his family.  Just so with nations, which in the larger family of man are individual members.  If a nation seclude itself, it is an exile in the midst of humanity.  No man, ladies and gentlemen, is independent of his fellow-man; no nation, however powerful, is independent of other nations.  Put the richest, the strongest man for a single week wholly apart from family, city, country, and he will quickly learn his essential weakness.  In a nation, the consequence of total isolation is not felt as soon, but it will at length be felt as surely.  The hours of nations are counted by years; yet the secluded nation, self-exiled from mankind, dwindles away.  Woe to the people, whose citizens care only for their own present, and not for the future of their country! the future, in which they have to live immortally by children and children’s children, with whose glory and happiness and power they ought now to sympathize.  Men or nations secluded are like the silk-worm, which secretes itself in a self-woven case, and at length creeps out to die.  So will it at length be with the nation which is wrapped up in self.

It is one of your glories, that some portions of your united republic are farther from other portions than Hungary is from Baltimore:  mere distance is therefore no reason why you should be unconcerned about our fate.  You are not too far for commercial intercourse with the most distant coasts of Europe; and especially since the invention of one of your citizens has been brought to higher perfection, the ocean rather unites