During the first months of the Diet of 1847-1848, which was to raise Hungary to the rank of those countries that proclaimed equal rights and possessed a responsible parliamentary government, it differed very little from the one preceding it.  The opposition initiated great reforms, as before, but there was no one who believed that their realization was near at hand.  Kossuth repeatedly addressed the House, and soon convinced his audience that he was as irresistible an orator as he had proved powerful as a writer.  But there was nothing to indicate that the country was on the eve of a great transformation.

The revolution of February, 1848, which broke out in Paris, changed, as if by magic, the relative positions of Austria and Hungary.  Metternich’s system of government, which was opposed to granting liberty to the people, collapsed at once.  The storm of popular indignation swept it away like a house built of cards.  At the first news of the occurrences in Paris, Kossuth asked in the Lower House for the creation of a responsible ministry.  The motion was favorably received, but in the Upper House it was rejected, the Government not being yet alive to the real state of affairs, and still hoping by a system of negation to frustrate the wishes of the people.  But very soon the revolution reared its head in Vienna itself, and the wishes of the Hungarian people, uttered at Budapest, received thereby a new and powerful advocate.

At that time the Hungarian Diet still met at Presburg, but the two sister-cities of Buda and Pest formed the real capital of the country and were the centre of commerce, industry, science, and literature.  Michael Vorosmarty, the poet laureate of the nation, lived in Pest, and there the twin stars of literature, Alexander Petofi and Maurice Jokai, shone on the national horizon.  Jokai, who is still living (1886) and enjoys a world-wide fame as a novelist, and Petofi, the eminent poet, who was destined to become the Tyrtaeus of his nation, were then both young men, full of enthusiasm and intrepid energy, and teeming with great ideas.

About these two gathered the other writers and youth of the University, and all of them, helping one another, contrived, on hearing the news of the sudden revolutions in Paris and Vienna, to enact in Budapest the bloodless revolution of March 15, 1848, which obtained the liberty of the press for the nation, and at the same time, in a solemn manifesto, gave expression to the wishes of the Hungarians in the matter of reform.  The only act of violence these revolutionary heroes were guilty of was the entering of a printing establishment, whose proprietor, afraid of the Government, had refused to print the admirable poem of Petofi entitled Talpra Magyar ("Up, Magyar"), and doing the printing there themselves.  The first stanza of this poem, later the war-song of the national movement, runs, in a literal translation, thus: 

  “Arise, O Magyar! thy country calls. 
   Here is the time, now or never. 
   Shall we be slaves or free? 
   That is the question—­choose! 
   We swear by the God of the Magyars,
   We swear, to be slaves no longer!”