you to us, than separates you.  Would you have the advantages of the connection, without the duties which spring out of it?  Disregard of duty sooner or later kills advantage.  I need not remind you what a link of nature, blood, language, science, industry, religion, civilization, exists between you and us, and binds us ever tighter.  You cannot help feeling at home our condition in Europe.  Our peace or war, our civilization or barbarism, our freedom or oppression, our wealth or starvation, progress or retrogression, must act upon you, just as your condition reacts upon us.  The link between the destinies of Christendom cannot be cut asunder.  In fact, there never yet was a time when Europe more demanded that you should have some policy towards it; and indifference is none at all.  At this moment it is under universal oppression of social, political, and religious liberty,—­the three treasures which make your glory and happiness.  This oppression is ordered by Russia, and executed by her satellites.  The elected President of France has impiously stabbed the constitution, to make himself Emperor.  The Austrian Ministry has openly declared that the absolutist powers will maintain him.  Thus the impulse of revolution has been given; its vibration will be felt throughout Europe and in my fatherland.  Never will you have an opportunity more glorious for you, and more favourable to mankind, for adopting a real policy founded upon principles.

The people of Hungary have abundant motives to risk life for freedom and independence.  Once we had a nationality; now we have none.  Once we had a constitution;—­by the blessing of God we succeeded to transform it three years ago from an aristocratic to a democratic one;—­now Hungary has no constitution at all.  For a thousand years we were a free people; we are now so no longer.  Like a flock of sheep, we are appropriated, not by the Austrian empire, not by the nation, but by a despotic ambitious family.  We had freedom of the press.  Not nineteen years ago, I began the struggle, and endured three years imprisonment for it; but we won that great right of mankind—­free expression of thought.  Now there is no press at all in Hungary; there is only the hangman and martial law.  We established equal protection for every religion; now there is equal oppression for all.  The Protestant Church had its own self-government for its churches and schools, won by victorious arms and secured by a hundred laws; now the laws are torn down, and the freedom of church and school is gone.  The Catholic Church had control of its own estates; now, day by day, the nearly bankrupt Austrian government is overgrowing that property by the poisonous weeds of a new loan, on which it vegetates, a curse to every nation on the continent.  Such is the condition of the Catholic Church, concerning which I—­a Protestant, not only by birth, but also by conviction—­declare, that during a whole lifetime, when Hungary was struggling