Born at the village of Monok, Zemplen County, on April 27, 1802, Kossuth had for his father a lesser noble, Slavic in origin, Lutheran in faith, and lawyer by profession. The son received a good education, and began to practice law, which led easily to politics. He sat in his county assembly, was early conspicuous as an advocate of popular rights and as an eloquent speaker. Thus equipped, he took his seat in the Diet of 1832, where, as proxy to a magnate, he had a voice but no vote. There seemed slight chance of his emerging from his proxy’s obscurity, but to genius all conditions are fluid. Kossuth conceived the plan of publishing the reports of the debates in the Diet. The government permitted no newspapers, and trimmed all other publications to suit its views; but the members of both Houses could speak freely, without danger of arrest for any of their utterances in the Diet. To circulate their speeches would, therefore, as Kossuth saw, put within reach of the Hungarians a mass of political reading not otherwise obtainable. Hardly had he begun to publish, ere government signified its desire of buying his press. Deprived of this, he employed secretaries who wrote out his abstracts of the proceedings and sent them through the mails to their destination. Government ordered its postmen to confiscate and destroy. Still unvanquished, Kossuth dispatched his budgets by special messengers. Government was foiled. By these devices, before the close of the Diet in 1836, Kossuth--the obscure magnate’s proxy--had become one of the most widely known men in the kingdom. The reports were literally _his_ reports, giving not only the tenor of the chief debates, but also his comments thereon. He now proposed to edit in similar fashion the proceedings of the quarterly meetings of the fifty-two county assemblies; but Government, no longer restrained by his inviolability as member of the Diet, arrested him. He spent two years in prison, denied books and all intercourse with his friends, before his case came to trial: then he was sentenced to a further confinement of four years, during which his great solace was the study of Shakespeare. Meanwhile, political and social agitation was swelling. The King, thinking a European war over the Eastern Question imminent, summoned another Diet to vote him a fresh subsidy and more soldiers. But the Diet, indignant and headstrong, refused all help till Kossuth and some other political prisoners should be released. The King yielded. Kossuth came forth a national hero.