Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

After all, it is national politics in which he asks us to interfere at whatever hazard. What is Hungary? Twelve millions of people under the iron foot of the Russian Czar, by means of his puppet, the Emperor of Austria. What says he to America? “I do not wish to be entangled with American politics.” As one of our own citizens said to me the other day, “What comes this fellow here for? I do not wish to meddle with Austrian politics.” The question of the liberty of twelve millions in Hungary is as much a question of Austrian politics, as the question of the three millions of slaves under the United States Constitution, and the human beings sent back as chattels under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1851, is a question of American politics.

Do not think either that I am so far out of the way in sending Fayette to Austria. Let me turn aside before I finish the illustration. What is Austria? Who is Haynau? The culminating star of Austrian atrocity, --the general whose name recalls everything that is most monstrous in Austria's treatment of down-trodden Hungary. Haynau! What was it that the European press charged upon him as his greatest atrocity? Why, he whipped one woman,--a countess; he whipped one woman at the public whipping-post. The press of Europe, from the banks of the Volga to the banks of the Seine, from the Times up to Punch, denounced him as a libel on the civilization of the nineteenth century, as a brute who had disgraced even the brutality of the camp, when he dared, in the face of Europe, in the nineteenth century, thus to outrage the common feeling of the world. That is Haynau; but he followed the example of half the States of this Union. There, woman-whipping is