There are two names to-day which are practically forgotten by modern England. Yet it is only half a century ago that the men who owned them were making a gallant stir for patriotism's sake.
How many Englishmen to-day remember the story of Kossuth and Pulszky? Yet fifty years ago their names sounded loudly enough in the political arena. Fifty years ago they had struck the drum of fame with a boom which reverberated through many a European country.
Yet here is a curious instance of the uncertainty which attends a nation's memory in regard to foreign heroes. Some quite unaccountable factor seems to rule their choice of whose achievements shall be nailed to the door of their memories, like British trophies of old, and which shall be completely forgotten. Garibaldi and Kossuth were patriots of the same decade—one of Italy, the other of Hungary. Yet to-day in England the "red shirt" of the Italian patriot still casts a flaming glow on the English memory, while the struggle of Kossuth for his country is almost dead to us, as far as our remembrance of it is concerned.
Nevertheless in the history of his country, what Kossuth achieved for her of independence and freedom was in no way less fine than Garibaldi's exploits.
In Francis Newman's Reminiscences of Two Wars and Two Exiles, the story of the Hungarian reformer and patriot stands out clearly before us. He gives as his reason for writing it that when, in 1851, Kossuth and Pulszky, his brother agitator, came to England, he himself became their close friend. He says: "When … Kossuth and Pulszky quitted England in 1860, Pulszky told me they were glad to leave behind in me one Englishman who knew all their secrets and could be trusted to expound them." He goes on, however, to say that he was never able to be of so much service to them as Mr. Toulmin Smith, "a constitutional lawyer … and a zealot for Hungary."
1848 was the year when the affairs of Hungary were at their most crucial point. For long the situation had been growing more and more strained between Austria and Hungary. Austria had been trying her hardest to force Hungary into entire subservience to herself—to force her to give up her separate individuality as a nation and become fused into the Austrian empire. But Hungary made a gallant stand against all these attempts which aimed at destroying her independence. She had always been a constitutional monarchy, with power of electing her own kings. Austria had always practically been considered to be a "foreigner" as far as Hungarian laws and offices were concerned.
The London Hungarian Committee in 1849 quoted Article X, by Leopold II, of the House of Hapsburg, in 1790, which definitely stated that "Hungary with her appanages is a free kingdom, and in regard to her whole legal form of government (including all the tribunals) independent; that is, entangled with no other kingdom or people, but having her own peculiar consistence and constitution; accordingly to be governed by her legitimately crowned king after her peculiar laws and customs."
This statute, however, was no sooner made than fresh attempts were made to nullify it. Hungary's needs, as a country, were many. Her taxation required alteration; her peasants had still feudal burdens to bear, instead of being freehold proprietors of land. Religious toleration was not enforced, and free trade was an unknown quantity, for Austria insisted on the produce of Hungary being sent only to her market. Fresh roads and bridges and agricultural improvements were imperatively necessary, but the need was passed by, by Austria.
To every nation, as to every individual, when the hour of worst need strikes, the hand of the man or woman who brings rescue is upon the latch of the door. In the present instance Kossuth was in readiness to redeem his country from the yoke of Austria.
In March, 1848, the Opposition in the Hungarian Diet, with Kossuth at their head, carried a vote "that the Constitution of Hungary could never be free from the machinations of the Austrian Cabinet until Constitutional Government was established in the foreign possessions of the Crown, so as to restore the legal status of the period at which the Diet freely conferred the royalty on the House of Hapsburg." This vote paralysed the Austrian authorities…. The Hungarian Diet immediately claimed for itself also a responsible ministry.