But my heart could not bear this sacrilege. I and my political friends, we called our people to arms to defend the palladium of our national existence, the privilege of self-government, and that political, civil, and religious liberty, and those democratic institutions, which, upon the glorious basis of self-government, we had succeeded to assert for all the people of Hungary. And the people nobly answered my call. We struck down the centralizing tyrant to the dust; we drove him and his double-faced eagle out from our country; our answer to his impious treachery was the declaration of our independence and his forfeiture of the crown. Were we right to do so, or not? We were; and _we had accomplished already our lawful enterprise victoriously_; we had taken our competent seat amongst the independent nations on earth. But the other independent powers, and alas! even the United States, lingered to acknowledge our dearly but gloriously bought independence; and beaten Austria had time to take her refuge under the shelter of the other principle, hostile to self-government, of the sacrilegious principle of FOREIGN ARMED INTERFERENCE. The Czar of Russia declared that the example of Hungary is dangerous to the interests of absolutism! He interfered, and aided by treason, he succeeded to crush freedom and self-government in Hungary, and to establish a centralized absolutism there, where, through all the ages of the past, the rule of despotism never had been established, and the United States let him silently accomplish this violation of the common law of nations. Gentlemen, the law of nations, upon which you have raised the lofty hall of your independence, does not exist any more. The despots are united and leagued against national self-government. They declare it inconsistent with their divine (rather Satanic) rights; and upon this basis all the nations of the European Continent are held in fetters; the government of France is become a vanguard to Russia, St. Petersburg is transferred to Paris, and England is forced to arm and to prepare for self-defence at home.