Ye Missionaries, who devote your lives to the propagation of Christianity, before you embark for the dangers of far, inhospitable shores, remind those whom you leave, that the example of a nation exercising right and justice on earth by charity, would be the mightiest propagandism of Christian religion.
Ye Patriots, loving your country's future, and anxious about her security, remember the admonitions of history—remember that the freedom, the power, and the prosperity in which your country glories, is no new apparition on earth; others also had it, and yet they are gone. The prudence with which your forefathers have founded this commonwealth, the courage with which you develop it, other nations also have shown, and still they are gone.
And ye ladies; ye fairest incarnation of the spirit of love, which vivifies the universe, remember my words. The heart of man is given into your tender hands. You mould it in its infancy. You imprint the lasting mark of character upon man's brow, You ennoble his youth; you soften the harshness of his manhood; you are the guardian angels of his hoary age. All your vocation is love, and your life is charity. The religion of charity wants your apostolate, and requires your aid. It is to you I appeal, and leave the sublime topic of my humble reflections to the meditations of your Christian hearts.
And thus, my task of to-day is done. Man shall earn the means of life by the sweat of his brow. Thus shall my family. Your charity of to-day has opened the way to it. The school which my mother, if God spares her life, will superintend, and in which two of my sisters will teach, and the humble farm which my third sister and her family shall work, will be the gift of your charity to-day.
A stony weight of cares is removed from my breast. Oh! be blessed for it, be thanked for it, in the name of them all who have lost every thing, but not their trust to God, and not the benefit of being able to work. My country will forgive me that I have taken from her the time of one day's work—to give bread to my aged mother and to my homeless sisters, the poor victims of unrelenting tyranny. Returning to Europe, I may find my own little children in a condition that again the father will have to take the spade or the pen into his hand to give them bread.
And my fatherland will again forgive me, that that time is taken from her. That is all what I take from her; nothing else of what is given, or what belongs to her. And the day's work which I take from my country, I will restore it by a night's labour. To-day, the son and the brother has done his task; you have requited his labour by a generous charity; the son and brother thanks you for it, and the patriot, to resume his task, bids you a hearty, warm farewell.
APPENDICES TO KOSSUTH'S SPEECHES.
Appendix I.—Extracts from a Letter to the 'Daily News,' dated January 17th, 1852, by Sabbas Vucovics, late Minister of Justice in Hungary, in answer to Count Casimir Bathyanyi.
So early as the commencement of the Serbian insurrection, the popular suspicion gained ground that the insurrection had been stirred up by the secret intrigues of the court, and confidence in the truth and good faith of the King disappeared accordingly. The nation, however, still indulged the hope that a weak King, though betrayed into ambiguous proceeding, would not permit himself to be carried away into a flagrant breach of the constitution. This was the time when the King, in the opinion of the people, was kept distinct from the Camarilla. But when the Austrian ministry openly attempted to deprive Hungary of its ministries of war and finance, when the base game of the degradation and restoration of Jellachich was played, and when the Hungarian army, fighting in the name of the King against the insurrections of the Serbians and Croats, became aware that the balls of that same King thinned their ranks from the hostile camp, the nation arrived at the universal conviction that the Hapsburg dynasty were only pursuing their old absolute tendencies, and that they wanted to force Hungary into self-defence, in order, under the pretext of rebellion, to deprive it of all its constitutional rights and guarantees. It needs no proof that a loud indignation, and even hatred of the dynasty, spread far and wide in the country, in consequence of these intrigues and proceedings. In spite of this natural excitement, and of the war itself, carried on by the nation with an increasing enthusiasm of hatred of the House of Austria, no party in the country urged a declaration of déchéance or forfeiture against the dynasty. Even all the faithless acts recorded in the letter of Count Casimir Bathyanyi, and the cruelties committed in the name of that court in Lower Hungary and Transylvania, did not turn the scales in this direction. The Pragmatic Sanction was still considered as good in law; and the many precedents of our history, when the nation and its kings went to war with each other, and ultimately settled their disputes by solemn pacts confirming the constitution of the land, conveyed the notion that a reconciliation was even then not impossible.
Without these precedents and reminiscences of history, and only guided by the universal feeling of the country against the dynasty, the Hungarian parliament would have pronounced the forfeiture of the House of Austria so far back as October, 1848, when Jellachich was appointed absolute plenipotentiary of the King in Hungary, with discretionary power of life and death; or in December, 1848, when in Olmütz the succession of the Hungarian throne was changed and determined, without the concurrence of the nation through the Diet. To force the nation and its parliament to the last step in this momentous crisis, the court itself broke the dynastic tie.