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what was most ‘respectable’ in church and state.
He had seen George Thompson, a co-worker with O'Connell1 in behalf of Irish and Catholic emancipation, singled out for dedication to mob violence by Henry Clay in the2 Senate Chamber.3 Like the priest in the parable, and like the Priest of all times, he walked by on the other side.
He had hardly touched his native shores when another foreigner embarked for the United States from the sister isle of Great Britain—destined to excite an even greater enthusiasm in America than Father Mathew had done; to be tried by the same touchstone; to follow his evil example; and equally to serve, not the ends of his mission, but a higher end in the pointing of a great moral lesson and the satisfaction of poetic justice.
Kossuth's coming had been long prepared.
A people born of revolution had watched with eager sympathy the course of the Hungarian uprising, and had fully adopted Kossuth as its hero.
None thought of applying to him Mr. Garrison's criterion, when, amid his contention with Father Mathew, in an article on “Patriotism and Christianity—Kossuth and Jesus,” Lib.
19.138; Writings of Garrison, p. 78. he wrote, in the summer of 1849: ‘He [Kossuth] is strictly local, territorial, national.
The independence of Hungary, alone, absorbs his thoughts and inspires his efforts; and, to obtain it, he feels justified [i. e., by the laws of war] in disregarding the claims of humanity, and suspending all the obligations of morality.’
No one anticipated that these words would exactly express
1 Ante, p. 331.
2 Ante, p. 327.
3 Clay had tried his hand at inciting mobs before. On Sept. 2, 1843, he wrote to his future biographer, the Rev. Calvin Colton, urging him to prepare a popular tract whose ‘great aim and object . . . should be to arouse the laboring classes in the free States against Abolition. Depict the consequences to them of immediate abolition. The slaves, being free, would be dispersed throughout the Union; they would enter into competition with the free laborer; with the American, the Irish, the German; reduce his wages; be confounded with him, and affect his moral and social standing. And as the ultras go for both abolition and amalgamation, show that their object is to unite in marriage the laboring white man and the laboring black man, and to reduce the white laboring man to the despised and degraded condition of the black man’ (Colton's “Private correspondence of Henry Clay,” p. 476).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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