The session of July 11th, during which Kossuth introduced in the House of Representatives his motions relating to the subject, presented a scene which beggars all description.  Kossuth ascended the tribune pale and haggard with illness, but the long-continued applause that greeted him after the first few sentences soon gave him back his strength and his marvellous oratorical power.  When he had concluded his speech and submitted to the House his request for two hundred thousand soldiers and the necessary money, a momentary pause of deep silence ensued.  Suddenly Paul Nyary, the leader of the opposition, arose, and lifting his right arm toward heaven, exclaimed:  “We grant it!” The House was in a fever of patriotic excitement; all the Deputies rose from their seats, shouting, “We grant it; we grant it!” Kossuth, with tears in his eyes, bowed to the representatives of the people and said, “You have risen like one man, and I bow down before the greatness of the nation.”

These sacrifices on the part of the country had become a matter of urgent necessity.  The Serb and Wallach insurrection assumed every day larger proportions, while the Croats, under the leadership of Jellachich, entered Hungarian territory with the fixed determination of depriving the nation of her constitutional liberties.  But the Hungarian Government was already able to send an army against the Croatians, who were marching on Budapest, plundering and laying waste everything before them.  They were surrounded by the Hungarian forces, and a part of their army, nine thousand men strong, was compelled to lay down its arms, while Jellachich, with his remaining forces, precipitately fled from the country.  The young Hungarian army had thus proved itself equal to the task of repelling the attack of the Croats, but the recent events were nevertheless fraught with the gravest consequences.

The news of the Croatian invasion filled the Hungarians with deep anxiety, and the extraordinary excitement caused by it cast a permanent cloud over the soul of that great and noble man, Count Szechenyi.  The mind of the great patriot who had initiated the national movement gave way under the strain of the frightful rumors coming from the Croatian frontier.  He had been ailing for some time, and his nervousness increased so greatly under the pressure of the great events following one another in rapid succession, that when the news came that the enemy had invaded the country he thought Hungary was lost.  His despair darkened his mind and he sought death in the waves of the Danube.  His family removed him to a private asylum near Vienna, where he recovered his mental faculties, and even wrote several books.  But he was never entirely cured of his hallucination, and, exasperated by the vexations he was subjected to by the Viennese Government, even in the asylum, the great patriot put an end to his own life on April 8, 1860, by a pistol-shot.