Two days before, Austria’s brave people in Vienna had broken its yoke; and summing up despots in the person of its tool, old Metternich, drove him away, and the Hapsburgs, trembling in their imperial cavern of imperial crimes, trembling, but treacherous, and lying and false, wrote with yard-long letters, the words, “Constitution” and “Free Press,” upon Vienna’s walls; and the people in joy cheered the inveterate liars, because the people knows no falsehood.

On the 14th I announced the tidings from Vienna to our Parliament at Presburg.  The announcement was swiftly carried by the great democrat, the steam-engine, upon the billows of the Danube, down to old Buda and to young Pesth, and while we, in the House of Representatives, passed the laws of justice and freedom, the people of Pesth rose in peaceful but majestic manifestation, declaring that the people should be free.  At this manifestation, all the barriers raised by violence against the laws, fell of themselves.  Not a drop of blood was shed.  A man who was in prison because he had dared to write a book, was carried home in triumph through the streets.  The people armed itself as a National Guard, the windows were illuminated, and bonfires burnt; and when these tidings returned back to Presburg, blended with the cheers from Vienna, they warmed the chill of our House of Lords, who readily agreed to the laws we proposed.  And there was rejoicing throughout the land.  For the first time for centuries the farmer awoke with the pleasant feeling that his time was now his own—­for the first time went out to till his field with the consoling thought that the ninth part of his harvest will not be taken by the landlord, and the tenth by the bishop.  Both had fully resigned their feudal portion, and the air was brightened by the lustre of freedom, and the very soil budding into a blooming paradise.

Such is the memory of the 15th of March, 1848.

One year later there was blood, but also victory, over the land; the people, because free, fought like demi-gods.  Seven great victories we had gained in that month of March.  On this very day, the remains of the first 10,000 Russians fled, over the frontiers of Transylvania, to tell at home how heavily the blow falls from free Hungarian arms.  It was in that very month that one evening I lay down in the bed, whence in the morning Windischgraetz had risen:  and from the battle-field (Isaszeg) I hastened to the Congress at Debreczin, to tell the Representatives of the nation:  “It is time to declare our national independence, because it is really achieved.  The Hapsburgs have not the power to contradict it more.”  Nor had they.  But Russia, having experienced by the test of its first interference, that there was no power on earth caring about the most flagrant violation of the laws of nations, and seeing by the silence of Great Britain and of the United States, that she may dare to violate those laws, our heroes had to meet a fresh force of