previous next
[51] tenants of the pulpit silenced, or subjected to a coat of tar and feathers; one State proposing to exclude the commerce of another; demagogue statesmen perambulating the country to save the Union; honest men exhorted to stifle their consciences, for fear the Ship of State should sink amid the breakers; the whole nation at last waking to Jefferson's conviction, that “we have the wolf by the ears; we can neither hold him nor safely let him go,” --yet this man, whose “tempest-tossed life has somewhat sharpened the eyes of his soul,” can see only a “solid basis of Liberty” “No tyrant to throw the apple of Eros in the Union;” “to raise the fury of hatred in thy national family” What place has such fulsome and baseless eulogy on the lips of a truthful and honest man?

I have a great deal more of the same tenor, but I shall weary your patience. You will not deny that this has been the general tenor of his addresses in America. “Now,” he says, “I do it because I love Hungary so much.”

Well, then, he is a patriotic and devoted Hungarian, -grant him that! He loves Hungary so much that his charity stops at the banks of the Danube. He is a lover of his mother-land. It is a great thing to suffer for one's mother-land; but still, it is a local patriotism. Even Webster loves the whites. It is something to love one's race, and so much is patriotism; but they claim for Kossuth that he represents the highest ideas of the nineteenth century. We do not dispute his title to this, that he has been devoted to Hungary. Grant him that. When Alexander had consecrated himself as a god, he sent word to the Lacedaemonians that he had made himself a god, and they sent him back word, “Be a god!” So if men only claim for Kossuth that he is ready to do and dare all for Hungary, we are willing to reply

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Hungary (Hungary) (4)
Jefferson City (Missouri, United States) (1)
America (Netherlands) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Louis Kossuth (2)
Webster (1)
Grant (1)
Eros (1)
Alexander (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: