Now, what position took the Roman Catholics of Hungary in our past struggle? There was not only no difference between them and the Protestants in their devotion for our country's freedom and independence, but they, according to the importance of their number, took in the struggle a very pre-eminent part. The Roman Catholic Bishops of Hungary protested against the perjurious treachery of the dynasty; many of them suffer even now for their devotion to justice, liberty, and right; and who is the Jesuit who dares to affirm that he is more devoted to the Catholic religion than the Bishops of Hungary? Our battalions were filled with Roman Catholic volunteers; Catholic priests led their faithful flocks to the battle field; our National Convention was composed in majority of Catholics--all the Catholic population, without any exception, consented to and cheered enthusiastically my being elected Governor of Hungary, though I am a Protestant. I had and I have their friendship, their devotion, their support; and when I formed the first Ministry of Independent Hungary, not only a full half of the new Ministry I entrusted to Roman Catholics, but especially I nominated a Roman Catholic Bishop to be Minister of public instruction, and all the Protestants of my country hailed the nomination with applause. Such is the cause of Hungary. Who dares now to charge me that that cause is hostile to the Roman Catholic religion? But I am allied with Mazzini, with the Romans, and with the Italians; thus goes on the charge: and these cursed Italians are enemies to the Pope. Not to the Pope as High Priest of the Roman Catholic Church, but as despotic sovereign of Rome and his corrupted temporal government--the worst of human inventions. How long has it been a principle of the Roman Catholic religion, that the Romans should not be Republicans? and that the high priest of the Roman church should be a despotic sovereign over the Roman nation? and in that capacity be a devoted ally and obedient servant to the Czar of Russia, the sworn enemy and bloody persecutor of Roman Catholicism? Why, when in 1849, the French Republic sent an army against the Roman Republic to restore the Pope, not to his spiritual authority, because that was by nobody contradicted, but to his temporal despotism, the whole danger could have been averted by the Romans by becoming, _en masse_, Protestants. The idea was pronounced in Rome and not a single Roman accepted it. They preferred to struggle without hope of victory--they preferred to bleed and to die rather than to abandon their faith.