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to each other by despotic governments not he formed for himself a national party, and only justifies, but necessitates the mutual aid became a leader of the people in his native of republicans. land.

That, as the combinations of arbitrary governments against the liberties of states are prompted and sustained by the Autocrat of Russia, the natural defender of despotism; it is both honorable and prudent for the sovereign people of the United States, the natural defenders of state rights, to favor all movements and combinations for their defense.

That the continued and legalized cruelties of despotic governments are more destructive than all the casualties of war and revolution; the duration of human life in Russia being at an average of 25 years, while in America it is 35 years.

That the massacres, confiscations, and imprisonments, ordered by despotic governments for the suppression of the liberties of independent states, ought to be regarded by a nation who have attained to happiness and power by resistance to foreign intervention, as terrible calamities, not only to those who suffer, but to themselves; and that the people of the United States, as the natural and able guardians of state rights, ought to interpose their powerful influence to prevent the perpetration of crimes against the laws of God and of nations.

In his reply to a political deputation, he declares that the curtailment of his own rights as a citizen of Hungary by the Austrian government, and his personal sufferings under a despotism, were his first initiation into the great society of freedom, and made him the head and organizer of a constitutional revolution in his native land. He comes before the world, not as a constitution maker, but as one who claims only freedom for his state, after having in person undergone the ordeal of political slavery.

Believing that the first course for the regeneration of Hungary was freedom of thought, he proceeded to write and circulate a journal of the proceedings of the Hungarian Parliament. For this he was three years unlawfully incarcerated, and only set free by the refusal of his Parliament to grant supplies until his sentence should be reversed. From that time forward he employed himself in the political instruction of the people, first by a newspaper, and, when that was suppressed, by lithographed letters, and finally, by social eloquence. By this course

Shut in at length, on all sides, by the jealousy of a foreign government, he turned himself toward the material interests of the people, and was here checked and hindered in the same manner. His countrymen began now to understand him, and to feel an ardent sympathy and respect for his proceedings. His friends became the majority of the nation, and began a system of political and social reform, extending important benefits to the lower and middle classes of the people. The opposition of Austria, and her direct interference in the domestic affairs of Hungary, gave rise to serious difficulties, and finally to a war between the Emperor of Austria and the people of Hungary. The failure of the war is attributed principally to the intervention of Russia, directed against the republican tendencies of Hungary, as the Czar himself declared; and secondly, to the treachery of a leading general, whose surrender demoralized and disorganized the Magyar army.

The history of this man is a cycle. At first, a humble citizen, he interests himself as a lawyer in the constitutional code of his nation. That nation was an independent member of the empire of Southern Europe, as the colonies of New-England were of the empire of Great Britain. He discovers alarming violations of the internal law of his nation by the imperial power, whose policy it is to consolidate the members of the empire, under the direct government of the Centre. He becomes an advocate of state rights. He attempts, in public, the vindication of the internal freedom of Hungary, against the arbitrary consolidation of the Centre. The power of the Centre imprisons him. His nation releases him. He then discovers the first secret of republican liberty, freedom of opinion, violated first in his own person.

Without power to enforce his principle after many unsuccessful attempts to establish it, he would at least render aid to his coun trymen by plans for their material interests Here, also, he is met by despotism, and dis covers, in consequence, the second secret o popular freedom, namely: that the citizer should be free in business and industry a well as in opinion.

But one more step is needed for so phi

losophical a mind, to make him a practical | not have so interested the affections of three republican; he must assert the freedom of powerful nations. Without virtue, he could self-defense, or of arms. He does so, and is defeated.

Observing that, if it had not been for combinations of despotic powers, Hungary would have vindicated her ancient right of selfgovernment, and himself be in the enjoyment of a free citizenship, instead of exile; he considers, that the freedom of the humblest citizen of a sovereign state is dependent upon the conduct, not of himself alone, or of his companions in arms, but of the entire constitutional and enlightened world; that there is a membership, a brotherhood of congenial governments, as well republican as despotic; that as despotism had hitherto beaten republicanism in detail, crushing, one by one, the disjointed members of its great enemy, a time must arrive for the union of free states; and when the day of union should arrive, Hungary would be able to maintain her independence, and become a powerful member of the grand fraternity. Acting upon this thought, he makes the tour of the world, seeking every where the aid of civilized nations, and calling upon them to recognize and stand by each other.

Thus do we seem to ourselves to have explained the most wonderful phenomenon of modern days-that the chief of an Asiatic tribe understands the practice and philosophy of the American Constitution; is able to give them eloquent lessons in the purest doctrines of modern polity, the doctrines of state sovereignty, and of the inherent liberty

of the citizen.

Here, too, we conceive, must lie the secret of his popularity and power as an orator and writer, in the fact that he derives the great doctrines of American republicanism, not from books, but from personal suffering by their violation.

He is then no rhetorician, appealing to the passions of men, in order to obscure their understandings. The motives of his eloquence are not based on pride and fury. He Las met fabricated a system upon false prenises, but upon sincere and manly expeience. He appeals to us as free men, not o flatter, but to reprove our inattention to ffairs in which we have a vital interest; and t is by a truly honest enthusiasm that he verthrows, for a time, all the calculations f interest.

A man without courage or talent could

not have maintained the reputation of a pure and upright statesman. Without genius and originality, he could not have led a party toward national reform; and unless inspired with the great sentiment of patriotism, his own sufferings would not have suggested to him those of his country. There is nothing vain, trifling, or theatric in the man. His exterior is modest, but profoundly serious, and his countenance bears marks of the highest order of reflection. All things considered, Kossuth seems to us by far the most imposing character of this age; a character whose deeds have reacted upon itself, and converted enthusiasm into an earnestness almost superhuman. His coming to us begins an epoch, and throws a new light upon our own future and that of the world. Hitherto we have thought only of ourselves and our internal relations; the time has arrived when we must take our position before the world as one of the brotherhood of nations, and employ our powerful influence for the establishment of a law of nations congenial to our own institutions.

Kossuth is a thoroughly educated and a thoroughly philosophical republican, even amongst ourselves. He declares that there can be no freedom while the central power absorbs that of the citizen, or of the states, or of the municipalities. He speaks of the sovereignty of the people as an individual right, inherent in the citizen, and as that from which all other sovereignty originates. "The People," he says, "must be a sovereign in his family"--by which opinion he abjures aristocracy-"in his country"-by which he would have the central power a mere elected agent of the citizens" and in his state;" by which he defends municipalities and states from the domination of the centre, and lodges the supreme power in its original source, the heart and mind of every intelligent member of the state. Kossuth seems to be of opinion that there will be no peace in the world while nations are oppressed; that is to say, while the rights of the citizen are denied. He observes that "the cheer of humanity which has greeted him, even from Sweden to the United States, is a revelation of the fraternal, the brotherly sentiment of distant nations," and persuades him that there is a "solidarity, an identity, in the destinies of mankind."

Surely, similarity is the principle of union, even among brutes; much more then among men, who in nothing so much associate, and are bound together, as in moral sentiment, in religion, and political feeling. The citizen of republican Hungary is properly in close sympathy with the citizen of the United Sates, because they are of one mind and one conscience in regard to national affairs, and each regards the other as prospering for the common good, or suffering for the common cause.

The great exile professes to have no regard for his own personal grandeur, but only for the correct representation of principles. Nor does he appear as the attorney or diplomatic ambassador of his nation, representing interests, in the capacity of an agent. As he was the first and greatest sufferer in the cause of freedom, he is its proper representative. If the crown of Hungary is ever tendered to him, he can put it aside, and say, "It was the desire of personal liberty, of the freedom of a citizen in his state, that prompted all my conduct. I have attained the height of my desire. To receive a crown would be to resign that for which I gave my life."

He wishes his country to become what it has been, the bulwark of European civilization against Asiatic despotism; the vanguard of freedom against the power of the East, which advances out of Siberia and the Ukraine to overwhelm Europe. Russia is to Europe what Media and Assyria were to Tyre and Jerusalem; what Persia and Tartary have been at times to the entire East; what the Empire of Bajazet once was to the Christianity of the West, when Greece and Hungary defended Italy and Germany single-handed against the Mohammedans.

But the aspirations of the illustrious exile are by no means romantic; he asks help, but he does not demand a crusade. He asks of England and America to reinstate Hungary by aid and protest in their own behalf, and to give her a listed field, and fair play, to make herself the champion of state sovereignty in Europe.

The Czar, throughout his empire, commands an army of a million of men, which can be augmented to a million and a half. By extraordinary efforts, he could concentrate a third of this number upon the frontiers of Hungary. The Magyar population have been lately estimated by the Austrians

at more than three millions; and as they are soldiers by profession and preference, a single call will bring an army of half a million into the field of the Maygars alone. It is only by the combination of two great powers that Hungary has been subdued. It was as though England and France had combined together for the suppression of the American colonists, numbering also three millions.

It cannot be denied that the policy of the exile, or, rather, our own acquiescence in that policy, might hasten the general catastrophe of revolution in Europe, and, by a remote possibility, even in the British empire. But we cannot suffer these conjectural catastrophes to stand before us in the path of duty, if that be clear. As a nation, we must regard our own interests as the paramount interests of the New Continent, were Hungary obliged thereby to wait ten years longer for her own release. Possibly it is the will of God that Catholic countries shall be always despotically governed. The protestantism of Europe is identical with its republicanism, and it may perhaps be a condition imposed by nature upon men, that they shall abjure the Jesuit before it is possible for them to shake off the despot. The liberal party in Hungary, we are assured, is Protestant; but they are immersed in a majority of superstition, and have the Jesuitical power and the empire (now transferred to St. Petersburgh) united against them. If, on the other hand, constitutional monarchy, and not republicanism, is the goal toward which they move, their success in that direction, for a population mixed and discordant like that of Hungary, is perhaps still worthy of the powerful and hearty good will and effectual influence of republics. The existence of such a monarchy would indeed depend upon the character of the sovereign, who might be a Charles X. or an Alfred, with a mighty difference for the nation; destined in the one case to become the slave of Russia, and in the other to be gradually moulded to a form of law and liberty, moving toward the same point, with England and France in company. But upon such points as these it needs but little to seem wise, and the knowledge of a god, to arrive at any valuable conclusion.

It is now an open question to the people of the United States, whether they shall or shall not exert their powerful influence in the

cause of state rights and free citizenship for all the world. If they take the position offered to them by all republicans, it will involve them in considerations of not less magnitude then those which occupied the framers of the Constitution of the Union.

Before entering upon the question, whether we shall or shall not exert our direct influence in the cause of state rights and free citizenship-a question which no man shall gainsay our title to agitate and to pronounce upon, in our own honorable right as the equal of all good citizens in the great republic-as a member, by our voice, and whatever ability may be ours, however small, of the governing and sovereign people of America, the mightiest power on which the sun has ever shone-exercising this right, as we desire the glory of our country and are prospered in soul with its prosperity, strong with its strength, and honored in its good name; before entering upon a free discussion of this topic of the century, which hearts more than heads are threatening to decide for us in hot haste, while we deliberate; it is necessary to dispose of certain moralities, that have thrust themselves in of late among the great arguments of polity, like ghosts at a banquet.

The doctrine of unconditional peace, and of negro equality, have arisen, to vex and complicate the formation of our foreign policy.

in the cause of popular or of constitutional freedom, are the longest lived, and the most peaceful and humane in social life. Human life is ten years longer in the United States than it is in Russia. An addition of ten years, from the age of twenty-five to that of thirty-five, the best years of human life, secured to us by our superior freedom and refinement. Had a million of men perished in the war of Independence, that loss of life would have been but a small fraction of the increase of population, and of life itself, consequent upon the freedom of the American States.

Nothing, on the other hand, is more advantageous to a man, and, consequently, to a nation, than a reputation for martial courage; nor is any trait more commonly associated with generosity and delicacy of character. Christianity, the gentlest, has been, since its rise, the most valiant and victorious faith; and its founder has expressly told us that "he came not to bring peace, but a sword."

Republicanism, itself the fruit of war, removes almost all the causes of internal irritation, and, consequently, of civil war, from a nation. But the opposition of its principle to that of despotism places it in an attitude of opposition toward all governments based upon their violation. By their very nature, despotic empires extend their boundaries. Conceding no inherent rights, and acknowledging no liberties, their rulers regard it as a duty, and find it in practice a necessity, to enlarge the circle of their control; and if a power like Hungary rises upon the edge of a despotic empire, imperious necessity urges its subjugation.

A "Society of Peace" has been formed, which proposes to substitute arbitration for the sword. But there are some things which cannot be submitted to arbitration, such as the freedom of the people and the liberty of states. Arbitration by kings or despotic For is not republicanism-the acknowledg presidents will not set forward the cause of ment of a right inherent in the citizen, not state rights, nor restrain the arms and diplo- only to govern himself, but to form his state macy of a powerful empire. Though "the-the most contagious of all systems to the state of peace be natural to men," so also is the state of war; nor was there ever a good cause without its soldiers and its martyrs. Submission to despotism is the death of manhood, and there are millions, says Kossuth, who would rather die than be enslaved. It seems to us to be a condescension on the part of reasonable men to argue the "peace question," as it is called, at all; when it appears that a "series of resolutions" will not take us into the Millennial epoch. Freedom, like the kingdom of heaven, "is taken by violence, and the violent taketh it by force." Of all nations, those who are readiest to sacrifice life

nature of men? Were it once discovered by the subjects of the Czar that freedom adds years of happiness to human life, that it gives splendor to youth, and wealth and wisdom to maturer years; would they not cast themselves headlong into the gulf of revolution, to secure these blessings for their children? They could not be men and do less than that.

In a word, it is not the peace question which at present agitates us, but very strictly the "war question;" and until the sword of despotism ceases to wave as now, naked and glittering over the heads of the people,

The doctrine of negro equality stumbles us on the very threshold of this argument.

If we assume the position of defenders of State sovereignty, we must cease to interest ourselves in the internal affairs of any State but our own. If, in defiance of this fundamental doctrine, we intervene between the two classes of inhabitants in the Southern States, and make war upon our fellow-citizens, to procure the election of the negro slave to an equality of position with ourselves, it will be a final period not so certainly to the union of the States as to their freedom, after so imperial an usurpation of the central power.

the peace question, for republicans at least, is | wonder-struck at the spectacle of foreign a remarkably futile topic of eloquence. A wars. More intellectual than any nation, truce, then, to these idle and, as they waste we have allowed ourselves to be stultified by our time and stultify us, these vicious ab- Teutonic obscurities, which would merit our stractions. Whether the people of the contempt, had they risen amongst ourselves. United States shall throw their powerful in- Scientific as it were by nature, and with ease fluence into the scale against despotism, as reaching the most labored conclusions of anthe patrons and defenders of state rights, tiquity, we crowd and weaken our mental is a question of prudence merely to do faculties with foreign criticism. A nation of this may be wrong and ruin to-day, and beautiful women and of men with the vigor necessity and safety to-morrow. It is a and nerve of heroes, we ravin and devour question of time. If it appears that their a literature of obese aristocracy. Freed aid is effectual and beneficial to the cause, from the vicious circles that hedge in the the people of America will not fail to render nobleman, and make him the slave of form it. Why then have we not already taken a and physical delicacy, we establish a puny step forward in this direction? Is it because exclusiveness, confessing our inability to suswe have been taught from infancy to despise tain ourselves. and fear ourselves? Has our education from infancy led us to believe that we are in need of Europe, and not Europe of us? Since the mighty truth has struck them, that the Western Empire is even physically greater, in resources, in wealth, and in military power, than either Britain or the Czar; since they have seen that the stalwart youth whose hand is equally familiar with the axe and the rifle, who knows no master but his God, has maintained, thus far, a silence not of indifference, but of prudence and necessity, in regard to foreign affairs; that the secret of the future is in the heart, not of kings, as in the old time, but of the fiery manhood of the West; the people of Europe look toward America with eyes of supplication, and stretch out their hands toward us and heaven. A veil has fallen, under which the mighty toil of men and angels went on so long in darkness, and the dazzling beauty and vast proportions of the work are at once made visible. The genius of the nation, whose shrines are in the hearts of all just men, advances modestly toward the glorious seat founded for her by the wisdom of our fathers, and, ere she assumes it, looks fearfully upward, as if supplicating the Most High against the pride of her exalted state. Educated by the literature of Europe, have we not hitherto lived one life and dreamed another? Has not the ridicule of experiment attached itself to our institutions? Have we not fancied our very skin to be a temporary clothing?

Reality has been theory, and fiction the sole thing to be revered. A nation of soldiers such as no battle-field has yet seen, we are awed by the thunder of foreign cannon,

No persons of the sect called Abolitionists, however numerous and patriotic they may be, can favor the movements of Kossuth, if they have a right appreciation of his doctrine. The unnatural violence required for the enforcement of extreme ideas compel all ultraists to assume a despotic tone, and to show a spirit of usurpation.

Leaving all such discussions as, in fact, irrelevant, let us adhere to the guiding principles of State sovereignty. We cannot at once accomplish all the decrees of destiny. The work before us is already too great for our genius and our power.

While we are deliberating whether to give aid to the republics of Europe, the news arrives of the usurpation of supreme power by the President of the French Republic. He arrests a fourth part of the people's representatives; he offers universal suffrage to the people, and a new election for himself.

Every step taken by this man since his election has been a movement toward imperial power. It was the virtual suffrage of

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