Ladies and gentlemen,--When four years ago, the tidings of our struggle made the scarcely before known name of Hungary familiar to you, sympathy for a nobly defended noble cause moved your hearts to rejoice at our victories, to feel anxiety about our dangers. Yet, so long as our struggle was but a domestic contest, a resistance against oppression by a perjurious king, you had no reason to think that the sympathy you felt for us, being a generous manifestation of the affections of free men, was at the same time an instinctive presentiment of a policy, which you in your national capacity will be called upon by circumstances, not only to consider, but, as I firmly believe, also to adopt. You were far from anticipating that the issue of our struggle would become an opportunity for your country to take that position which Divine Providence has evidently assigned to you; I mean the position of a power, not restricted in its influence to the Western Hemisphere, but reaching across the earth. You had not thought that it is the struggle of Hungary which will call on you to fulfil the prophecy of Canning; who comprehended, that it is the destiny of the New World to redress the balance of power in the Old. The universal importance of our contest has been but late revealed. It has been revealed by the interference of Russia, by our fall, and by its more threatening results. Now, it has become evident to all thinking men, that the balance of power cannot be redressed unless Hungary is restored to national independence. Consequently if it be your own necessity to weigh in the scale of the powers on earth, if it be your destiny to redress the balance of power, the cause of Hungary is the field where this destiny will have to be fulfilled. And it is indeed your destiny. Russian diplomacy could never boast of a greater and more fatal victory than it had a right to boast, should it succeed to persuade the United States not to care about her--Russia accomplishing her aim to become the ruling power in Europe; the ruling power in Asia; the ruling power of the Mediterranean sea. That would be indeed a great triumph to Russian diplomacy, greater than her triumph over Hungary; a triumph dreadful to all humanity, but to nobody more dreadful than to your own future. All sophistry is in vain, gentlemen; there can be no mistake about it. Russian absolutism and Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism are not rival but antagonist powers. They cannot long continue to subsist together. Antagonists cannot hold equal position; every additional strength of the one is a comparative weakening of the other. One or the other must yield. One or the other must perish or become dependent on the other's will.