Select Speeches of Kossuth | Page 7

their nation's struggle, it received from Europe more than kind wishes. It received material aid from others in times past, and it will, doubtless, now impart its mighty agency to achieve the liberty of other lands.
Citizens, I thank you for having addressed me, not in the language of party, but in the language of liberty, which is that of the United States. I come hither, in the name of Hungary, to entreat, not from any party among you, but from your whole nation, a generous protection for my country. And for that very reason, neither will I intermeddle with any of your party questions. In England I often avowed this principle; inasmuch as the very mission on which I come, is to ask that the right of every nation to arrange its domestic concerns may be respected. Notwithstanding this, I am sorry to see, that, before my arrival, I have been charged with intermeddling with your presidential election, because in one of my addresses in England I mentioned the name of your fellow-citizen, Mr. Walker, as one of the candidates for the Presidency. I confess with warm gratitude, that Mr. Walker uttered such sentiments in England, as, if happily they are also those of the United States, will enable me to declare, that Hungary and Europe are free. Therefore I feel deeply indebted to him. But in no respect did I mix myself up with your elections. I consider no man honest who does not observe towards other nations the principles which he desires to be observed towards his own: and therefore I will not interfere in your domestic questions.
Allow me, citizens, to advert to one expression of your kind address, personal to myself. You named me "Kossuth, Governor of Hungary."
My nomination to be Governor was not to gratify ambition. Never, perhaps, did I feel sadder, than at the moment when that title was conferred upon me; for I compared my feeble faculties and its high responsibilities. It is therefore not from ambition that I thank you for the title, but because the title rests upon our Declaration of Independence; and by acknowledging it as mine, you recognize the rightfulness and validity of that Declaration. And, gentlemen I frankly declare that your whole people are bound in honour and duty to recognize it. At this moment there is no other legitimate existing law in Hungary. It was not the proclamation of a man or of a party. It was the solemn declaration of the whole nation in Congress assembled. It was sanctioned by every village, and by every municipality. No counter-proclamation has gone forth from Hungary. It has been overturned solely by the invasion of an ambitious foreign power, the Czar of Russia; who can no more legitimately make or unmake a governor of Hungary, than General Santa Anna, if in your late war he had forced his way to Washington, could have unmade President Taylor. None of you will admit that violence can destroy righteousness: it can but establish unlawful, unrightful fact. If so,--if your own people, and not foreign invaders, are the source of rightful law to you,--you must in consistency recognize our Independence as legitimate, and its declaration as our still rightful law.
As to the praises which you were so kind as to bestow upon me, it is no affectation in me when I declare that I am not conscious of having any other merit than that of being a plain, straightforward man, a faithful friend of freedom, a good patriot. And these qualities, gentlemen, are so natural to every honest man, that it is scarcely worth while to speak of them; for I cannot conceive how a man with understanding and with a sound heart, can be anything else than a good patriot and a lover of freedom.
Yet my humble capacity has not preserved me from calumnies. Scarcely had I arrived here, when I learned that I had been charged in the United States with being an irreligious man. So long as despots exist, and have the means to pay, they will find men to calumniate those who are opposed to tyranny. But, suppose I were the most dishonest creature in the world; in the name of all that is sacred, _what would that matter in respect to the cause of Hungary?_ Would that cause become less just, less righteous, less worthy of your sympathy, because I, for instance, am a bad man? No! I believe you. It is not a question in regard to any individual here. It is a question with regard to a just cause, the cause of a country worthy to take its place in the great family of the free nations of the world. Until I learn that you refuse to recognize nations, whenever their governors fall short of religious perfection,