Since that time, France has been twice a Republic, and changed its constitutions thirteen times; and, though thirty-six millions strong, it has lost every foot of land on the continent of America, and at home it lies prostrated beneath the feet of the most inglorious usurper that ever dared to raise ambition’s bloody seat upon the ruins of liberty.  And your Republic?  It has grown a giant of power.  And Ohio? out of the ruins of a trading-house into a mighty commonwealth of two millions of free and happy men, who shout out with a voice like the thunderstorm, to the despots of the Old World, “ye shall stop in your ambitious way before the power of freedom, ready to protect the common laws of all humanity.”

What a glorious triumph of your institutions over the principles of CENTRALIZED government!

Oh! may all the generations yet unborn, and all the millions who will yet gather in this New World of the West, which soon will preponderate in the scale of the Union, where all the west weighed nothing fifty years ago—­may they all ever and ever remember the high instruction which the Almighty has revealed in this parallel of different results.

Sir, you say that Ohio can show no battle field connected with recollections of your own glorious revolution.  Let me answer, that the whole West is a monument, and Cincinnati the fair cornice of it.  If your eastern sister States have instructed the world how nations become independent and free, the West shows to the world what a nation once independent and really free can become.

Allow me to declare, that by standing before the world as such an instructive example, you exercise the most effective revolutionary propaganda; for if the mis-result of French revolutions discourage the nations from shaking off the ‘oppressors’ yoke, your victory,—­and still more, your unparalleled prosperity,—­has encouraged oppressed nations to dare what you dared.

Egotists and hypocrites may say that you are not responsible for it; you have bid nobody to follow you:—­and it may be true that you are not responsible before a tribunal.  Still, you are sufficiently free not to feel offended by a true word; therefore I say you are responsible before your own conscience, for, your example having started a new doctrine, the teacher of a new doctrine is morally bound not to forsake his doctrine when assailed in the person of his disciples.

* * * * *

XXX.—­WAR A PROVIDENTIAL NECESSITY AGAINST OPPRESSION.

[To the Clergy of Cincinnati.]

The clergy of Cincinnati addressed Kossuth by the mouth of the Rev. Mr.
Fisher.  Among other topics, this gentleman said:—­