should be the _mot d’ordre_ of the present time.” In 1858, when the Austrian Ministry exerted pressure on the Hungarian Academy to abolish the articles of its statutes which constituted the culture of the Magyar language, its fundamental task, Széchényi wrote another letter, which describes his mental condition: “Can I be silent when I see that noble seed crushed? Can I forget the services which that powerful benefactor has rendered us? I ask--I, whose misfortune lies, not in a vague confusion of ideas, but, on the contrary, in the fatal gift of seeing too clearly, too distinctly, to make any illusion possible. Ought I not to raise a cry of alarm, seeing our dynasty possessed by I know not what evil influence, fighting against the most energetic of its peoples, against that for whom the future reserves the highest destiny, and not only contemning it but stifling it, depriving it of its proper character, shaking to its roots the secular tree of the empire. Founder of this Academy, it is my duty to-day to speak. So long as my head is on my shoulders, so long as my brain is not entirely obscured, so long as the light of my eyes remains unveiled by eternal night, I shall retain my right to decide concerning the rules. Our Emperor will sooner or later understand that the assimilation of the races of the empire is merely the Utopia of his ministers; the day will come when all will detach themselves. Hungary alone, which has no racial affinity with the other European nations, will seek to accomplish its own destiny beneath the ægis of the royal dynasty.” That was in 1858. In 1859, even before the outbreak of war, he prophesied defeat, and showed its results: “There are crises,” he said, “which lead to cure when the sick person is not incurable.” He published at London a book in which, in a strange and humorous, but at the same time terrible way, he traced the history of Hungary’s sufferings under Bach’s iron rule, sketched the future of his country, and counselled a policy of concord, parallel but not servile to that of Austria. “In truth,” he wrote himself, “this book is miserable; but do you know how the Margaret Island was formed? According to an old legend, the Danube once occupied its site; some carrion once, no one knows how, settled on to a sand-bank and became attached there. Whatever the river swept down, froth, leaves, branches, trees, all were piled up there, and at last a magnificent island arose. My work is something like that carrion. Who knows what may arise out of it at last?”