Some time back there appeared in certain New York papers systematic falsehoods, which went so far as to state that we, the Hungarians, had struggled for oppression, while it was the Austrian dynasty which stood up for liberty! Such effrontery astonishes even one who has seen Russian treacheries. We may be misrepresented, scorned, jeered at, censured. Our martyrs, whose blood cries for revenge, may be laughed at as fools. Heroes, who will command the veneration of history, may be called Don Quixotes. But that among freemen and professed republicans even the honour of an unfortunate nation, in its most mournful suffering, should not be sacred,—that is indeed a sorrowful page in human history.
You cannot expect me to enter into a special refutation of this compound of calumnies. I may reserve it for my pen. But inasmuch as the basis of all the calumnies lies in general ignorance concerning the relation of the Magyars to other races of Hungary, permit me to speak on the question of NATIONALITIES, a false theory of which plays so mischievous a part in the destinies of Europe. No word has been more misrepresented than the word Nationality, which is become in the hands of absolutism a dangerous instrument against liberty.
Let me ask you, gentlemen: are you, the people of the United States, a nation, or not? Have you a national government, or not? You answer, yes: and yet you are not all of one blood, nor of one language. Millions of you speak English; others French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, and even several Indian dialects: yet you are a nation. Neither your central government, nor those of separate states, nor your municipalities, legislate or administer in every language spoken among you; yet you have a national government.
Now, suppose many of you were struck with the curse of Babel, and exclaimed, "This union is an oppression! our laws, our institutions, our state and city governments, are an oppression! What is union to us? what are rights? what avail laws? what is freedom? what is geography? what is community of interests to us? They are all nothing; LANGUAGE is everything. Let us divide the Union, divide the states, divide the very cities, divide the whole territory, according to languages. Let the people of every language become a separate state: for every nation has a right to national life, and to us, the language, and nothing else, is the nationality. Unless the state is founded upon language, its organization is tyranny."
What then would become of your great Union? What of your constitution, the glorious legacy of your greatest man? What of those immortal stars on mankind's moral sky? What would become of your country itself, whence the spirit of freedom soars into light, and rising hope irradiates the future of humanity? What would become of this grand, mighty complex of your republic, should her integrity ever be rent by the fanatics of language? Where now she walks among the rising temples of liberty and happiness, she soon would tread upon ruins, and mourn over human hopes. But happy art then, free nation of America, founded on the only solid basis,—liberty! a principle steady as the world, eternal as the truth, universal for every climate, for every time, like Providence. Tyrants are not in the midst of you to throw the apple of discord and raise hatred in this national family, hatred of races, that curse of humanity, that venomous ally of despotism. Glorious it is to see the oppressed of diverse countries,—diverse in language, history, habits,—wandering to these shores, and becoming members of this great nation, regenerated by the principle of common liberty.
If language alone makes a nation, then there is no great nation on earth: for there is no country whose population is counted by millions, but speaks more than one language. No! It is not language only. Community of interests, of rights, of duties, of history, but chiefly community of institutions; by which a population, varying perhaps in tongue and race, is bound together through daily intercourse in the towns, which are the centres and home of commerce and industry:—besides these, the very mountain-ranges, the system of rivers and streams,—the soil, the dust of which is mingled with the mortal remains of those ancestors who bled on the same field, for the same interests, the common inheritance of glory and of woe, the community of laws and institutions, common freedom or common oppression:—all this enters into the complex idea of Nationality.
That this is instinctively felt by the common sense of the people, nowhere is more manifestly shown than at this very moment in my native land. Hungary was declared by Francis Joseph of Austria no more to exist as a Nation, no more as a State. It was and is put under martial law. Strangers, aliens to our laws and history as well as to our tongue, rule now, where our fathers lived and our brothers bled. To be a Hungarian is become almost a crime in our own native land. Well: to justify before the world the extinction of Hungary, the partition of its territory, and the reincorporating of the dissected limbs into the common body of servitude, the treacherous dynasty was anxious to show that the Hungarians are in a minority in their own land. They hoped that intimidation and terrorism would induce even the very Magyars to disavow their language and birth. They ordered a census of races to be made. They performed it with the iron rule of martial law; and dealt so arbitrarily that thousands of women and men, who professed to be Magyars, who professed not to know any other language than the Magyar, were, notwithstanding all their protestation, put down as Sclaves, Serbs, Germans, or Wallachians, because their names had not quite a Hungarian sound. And still what was the issue of this malignant plot? That of the twelve millions of inhabitants of Hungary proper, the Magyars turned out to be more than eight millions, some two millions more than we know the case really is. The people instinctively felt that the tyrant had the design through the pretext of language to destroy the existence of the complex nation, and it met the tyrannic plot as if it answered, "We are, and must be, a nation; and if the tyrant takes language only for the mark of nationality, then we are all Magyars." And mark well, gentlemen! this happened, not under my governorship, but under the rule of Austrian martial law. The Cabinet of Vienna became furious; it thought of a new census, but prudent men told them that a new census would give the whole twelve millions as Magyars; thus no new census was taken.
But on the European continent there unhappily has grown up a school, which bound the idea of nationality to the idea of language only, and joined political pretensions to it. There are some who advocate the theory that existing States must cease, and the territories of the world be divided anew by languages and nations, separated by tongues.
You are aware that this idea, if it were not impracticable, would be a curse to humanity—a deathblow to civilization and progress, and throw back mankind by centuries. It would be an eternal source of strife and war: for there is a holy, almost religious tie, by which man's heart is bound to his home, and no man would ever consent to abandon his native land only because his neighbours speak another language than himself. His heart claims that sacred spot where the ashes of his fathers lie—where his own cradle stood—where he dreamed the happy dreams of youth, and where nature itself bears a mark of his manhood's toil. The idea were worse than the old migration of nations was. Nothing but despotism would rise out of such a fanatical strife of all mankind.
And really it is very curious. Nobody of the advocates of this mischievous theory is willing to yield to it for himself—but others he desires to yield to it. Every Frenchman becomes furious when his Alsace is claimed to Germany by the right of language—or the borders of his Pyrenees to Spain—but there are some amongst the very men who feel revolted at this idea, who claim of Germany that it should yield up large territory because one part of the inhabitants speak a different tongue, and would claim from Hungary to divide its territory, which God himself has limited by its range of mountains and the system of streams, as also by all the links of a community of more than a thousand years; to cut off our right hand, Transylvania, and to give it up to the neighbouring Wallachia, to cut out like Shylock one pound of our very breast—the Banat—and the rich country between the Danube and Theiss—to augment by it Turkish Serbia and so forth. It is the new ambition of conquest, but an easy conquest not by arms, but by language.