Sir, though I have a noble pride in my principles, and the inspiration of a just cause, still I have also the consciousness of my personal insignificance.  Never will I forget what is due from me to the Sovereign Source of my public capacity.  This I owe to my nation’s dignity; and therefore, respectfully thanking this highly distinguished assembly in my country’s name, I have the boldness to say that Hungary well deserves your sympathy; that Hungary has a claim to protection, because it has a claim to justice.  But as to myself, I am well aware that in all these honours I have no personal share.  Nay, I know that even that which might seem to be personal in your toast, is only an acknowledgment of a historical fact, very instructively connected with a principle valuable and dear to every republican heart in the United States of America.  As to ambition, I indeed never was able to understand how anybody can love ambition more than liberty.  But I am glad to state a historical fact, as a principal demonstration of that influence which institutions exercise upon the character of nations.

We Hungarians are very fond of the principle of municipal self-government, and we have a natural horror against centralization.  That fond attachment to municipal self-government, without which there is no provincial freedom possible, is a fundamental feature of our national character.  We brought it with us from far Asia a thousand years ago, and we preserved it throughout the vicissitudes of ten centuries.  No nation has perhaps so much struggled and suffered for the civilized Christian world as we.  We do not complain of this lot.  It may be heavy, but it is not inglorious.  Where the cradle of our Saviour stood, and where His divine doctrine was founded, there now another faith rules:  the whole of Europe’s armed pilgrimage could not avert this fate from that sacred spot, nor stop the rushing waves of Islamism from absorbing the Christian empire of Constantine. We stopped those rushing waves.  The breast of my nation proved a breakwater to them.  We guarded Christendom, that Luthers and Calvins might reform it.  It was a dangerous time, and its dangers often placed the confidence of all my nation into one man’s hand.  But there was not a single instance in our history where a man honoured by his people’s confidence deceived them for his own ambition.  The man out of whom Russian diplomacy succeeded in making a murderer of his nation’s hopes, gained some victories when victories were the chief necessity of the moment, and at the head of an army, circumstances gave him the ability to ruin his country; but he never had the people’s confidence.  So even he is no contradiction to the historical truth, that no Hungarian whom his nation honoured with its confidence was ever seduced by ambition to become dangerous to his country’s liberty.  That is a remarkable fact, and yet it is not accidental; it springs from the proper influence of institutions upon the national character.  Our nation, through all its history, was educated in the school of local self-government; and in such a country, grasping ambition having no field, has no place in man’s character.