Blind to their interests, the nations abandoned their real liberty, the municipal institutions, for a nominal responsibility of ministers and for parliamentary omnipotence.  Instead of clinging to the principle of self-government—­the true breakwater against the encroachments of kings, of ministers, of parliaments—­they abandoned the principle which enforces the real responsibility of ministers and raises the parliament to the glorious position of the people’s faithful servant; they exchanged the real liberty of self-government for the fascinating phantom of parliamentary omnipotence, making the elected of the people the masters of the people, which, if it is really to be free, cannot have any master but God.  The old Anglo-Saxon municipal freedom has even in England been weakened by this tendency; parliament has not only fought against the prerogative of the crown, but has conquered the municipal freedom of the country and of the borough.  Green Erin sighs painfully under this pressure, and English statesmen begin to be alarmed.  Hungary, my own dear fatherland, was the only country in Europe which, amidst all adversaries, amidst all attacks of foreign encroachment and all inducements of false new doctrines, remained faithful to the great principle of self-government, at which the perjurious dynasty of Austria has never ceased to aim deadly blows.  To get rid of these incessant attacks we availed ourselves of the condition of Europe in 1848, and got our old national self-government guarantied in a legal way, with the sanction of our then king, by substituting individual for collective responsibility of ministers; having experienced that a board of ministers, though responsible by law and composed of our own countrymen, was naturally and necessarily in practice irresponsible.  When the tyrants of Austria, whom our forefathers had elected in an ill-fated hour to be our constitutional kings, saw that their designs of centralization were obstructed, they forsook their honour, they broke their oath, they tore asunder the compact by which they had become kings; the diadem had lost its brightness for them if it was not to be despotic.

They stirred up robbers and rebels against us:  and when this failed, then with all the forces of the empire attacked Hungary unexpectedly, not thinking to meet with a serious opposition, because we had no army, no arms, no ammunition, no money, no friends.  They therefore declared our constitution and our self-government, which we have preserved through the adversities of ten centuries, at once and for ever abolished.

But my heart could not bear this sacrilege.  I and my political friends, we called our people to arms to defend the palladium of our national existence, the privilege of self-government, and that political, civil, and religious liberty, and those democratic institutions, which, upon the glorious basis of self-government, we had succeeded to assert for all the people of Hungary.  And the people nobly answered my call.  We struck down the centralizing tyrant to the dust; we drove him and his double-faced eagle out from our country; our answer to his impious treachery was the declaration of our independence and his forfeiture of the crown.