"Already, Sire! have these new laws and liberties, giving the surest guarantees for the freedom of the people, struck root so deeply in the hearts of the nation, that public opinion makes it our duty to represent to your Majesty, that the Hungarian people could not but lose that devotion and veneration, consecrated and proved on so many occasions, up to the present time, if it was attempted to make them believe that the violation of the laws, and of the government sanctioned and established by your majesty, is committed with the consent of the king. "But if, on the one hand, we are strongly convinced that your majesty has taken no part in the intrigues so basely woven against the Hungarian people, we are not the less persuaded, that that people, taking arms to defend their liberty, have stood on legal ground, and that in obeying instinctively the supreme law of nations, _which demands the safety of all_, they have at the same time saved the dignity of the throne and the monarchy, greatly compromised by advisers as dangerous as they are rash. "Sire! We, the chief pastors of the greatest part of the Hungarian people, know better than any others their noble sentiments; and we venture to assert, in accordance with history, that there does not exist a people more faithful to their monarchs than the Hungarians, when they are governed according to their laws. "We guarantee to your majesty, that this people, such faithful observers of order and of the civil laws in the midst of the present turmoils, desire nothing but the peaceable enjoyment of the liberties granted and sanctioned by the throne. "In this deep conviction, moved also by the sacred interests of the country and the good of the church, which sees in your majesty her first and principal defender, we, the bishops of Hungary, humbly entreat your majesty patiently to look upon our country now in danger. Let your majesty deign to think a moment upon the lamentable situation in which this wretched country is at present, where thousands of your innocent subjects, who formerly all lived together in peace and brotherhood on all sides, notwithstanding difference of races, now find themselves plunged into the most frightful misery by their civil wars. "The blood of the people is flowing in torrents--thousands of your majesty's faithful subjects are, some massacred, others wandering about without shelter, and reduced to beggary--our towns, our villages, are nothing but heaps of ashes--the clash of arms has driven the faithful people from our temples, which have become deserted--the mourning church weeps over the fall of religion, and the education of the people is interrupted and abandoned.