This statute, however, was no sooner made than fresh attempts were made to nullify it. Hungary's needs, as a country, were many. Her taxation required alteration; her peasants had still feudal burdens to bear, instead of being freehold proprietors of land. Religious toleration was not enforced, and free trade was an unknown quantity, for Austria insisted on the produce of Hungary being sent only to her market. Fresh roads and bridges and agricultural improvements were imperatively necessary, but the need was passed by, by Austria. To every nation, as to every individual, when the hour of worst need strikes, the hand of the man or woman who brings rescue is upon the latch of the door. In the present instance Kossuth was in readiness to redeem his country from the yoke of Austria. In March, 1848, the Opposition in the Hungarian Diet, with Kossuth at their head, carried a vote "that the Constitution of Hungary could never be free from the machinations of the Austrian Cabinet until Constitutional Government was established in the foreign possessions of the Crown, so as to restore the legal status of the period at which the Diet freely conferred the royalty on the House of Hapsburg." This vote paralysed the Austrian authorities.... The Hungarian Diet immediately claimed for itself also a responsible ministry. Prompt measures were now taken by the Hungarians to restore the old status of the country, and laws were made which conferred upon the peasants freeholds of land and all other reforms for which they had for so long been agitating. The London Hungarian Committee, to whose paper I have before referred, tells us that before the French Revolution had broken out this Bill had passed both Houses. "The Austrian Cabinet, seeing their overwhelming unanimity, felt that resistance was impossible"; consequently this Reform Bill of April, 1848, was considered by all Hungarian patriots as their Magna Charta.