We shall have no fair play.  The Cossack already rules, by Louis Napoleon’s usurpation, to the very borders of the Atlantic Ocean.  One of your great statesmen—­now, to my deep sorrow, bound to the sick bed of far advanced age[*]—­(alas! that I am deprived of the advice which his wisdom could have imparted to me)—­your great statesman told the world thirty years ago that Paris was transferred to St. Petersburg.  What would he now say, when St. Petersburg is transferred to Paris, and Europe is but an appendage to Russia?

[Footnote *:  Henry Clay, since deceased.]

Alas!  Europe can no longer secure to Europe fair play.  England only remains; but even England casts a sorrowful glance over the waves.  Still, we will stand our ground, “sink or swim, live or die.”  You know the word; it is your own.  We will follow it; it will be a bloody path to tread.  Despots have conspired against the world.  Terror spreads over Europe, and persecutes by way of anticipation.  From Paris to Pesth there is a gloomy silence, like the silence of nature before the terrors of a hurricane.  It is a sensible silence, disturbed only by the thousandfold rattling of muskets by which Napoleon prepares to crush the people who gave him a home when he was an exile, and by the groans of new martyrs in Sicily, Milan, Vienna, and Pesth.  The very sympathy which I met in England, and was expected to meet here, throws my sisters into the dungeons of Austria.  Well, God’s will be done!  The heart may break, but duty will be done.  We will stand our place, though to us in Europe there be no “fair play.”  But so much I hope, that no just man on earth can charge me with unbecoming arrogance, when here, on this soil of freedom, I kneel down and raise my prayer to God:  “Almighty Father of Humanity, will thy merciful arm not raise up a power on earth to protect the law of nations when there are so many to violate it?” It is a prayer and nothing else.  What would remain to the oppressed if they were not even permitted to pray?  The rest is in the hand of God.

Sir, I most fervently thank you for the acknowledgment that my country has proved worthy to be free.  Yes, gentlemen, I feel proud at my nation’s character, heroism, love of freedom and vitality; and I bow with reverential awe before the decree of Providence which has placed my country into a position such that, without its restoration to independence, there is no possibility for freedom and independence of nations on the European continent.  Even what now in France is coming to pass proves the truth of this.  Every disappointed hope with which Europe looked towards France is a degree more added to the importance of Hungary to the world.  Upon our plains were fought the decisive battles for Christendom; there will be fought the decisive battle for the independence, of nations, for State rights, for international law, and for democratic liberty.  We will live free, or die like men; but should my people be doomed to die, it will be the first whose death will not be recorded as suicide, but as a martyrdom for the world, and future ages will mourn over the sad fate of the Magyar race, doomed to perish, not because we deserved it, but because in the nineteenth century there was nobody to protect “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”