Bethlen Naptár, 1957 (Ligonier)
To Our New Generations
BETHLEN NAPTÁR 201 SENATOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRICK'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. CONGRESS Referring to the racial character of this organization alluded to by the gentleman from Iowa, I want to say this: They have come to us to better their conditions and I want to make them feel at home. They are here to swell the stream of our best citizenship, numbering now over a quarter of a million souls. They have come to make this country their permanent dwelling place, to live and abide with us in the truest and most loyal of American sentiment and patriotism. They inhabit every state and territory of the United States, and everywhere have they entered into the very essence of our national spirit, hope and enterprise; and among other things, this organization is founded upon the lively behest of that desire. Why, Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the members of the House: Have you ever read and pondered over the thrilling story of Hungary’s heroic struggle, during a thousand years, for just such liberty as we possess? An accurate history of Hungarian wars and their heroes would teach even the sons and daughters of the Mayflower and the Concord the awful magnificence of a martyrdon endured by a great people for freedom. These children of a heroic ancestry come to us with all the institutions of our civilization implanted in their hearts through twenty generations of turmoil in the pursuit of liberty, they find here. Every Hungarian in this country can look back over the red pages of their fathers’ struggles and trace with boundless pride and satisfaction a strange and startling resemblance between the Hungarian revolution and our own. Under Kossuth, and Bem, and Klapka, and Dembinski, what did they fight for what would make them alien and strange to us? Nothing. They performed unheard of and astonishing deeds with one great idea — the freedom of independence. They alone of all Europe held aloft the blazing torch of liberty with dauntless heart and unshaken hand. They fought with God-like valor for the freedom of the press, a constitution, a ministry and a representative body to govern their own destinies. They fought for equality before the law in all civil and religious affairs — equality in taxation, trial by jury and local self-government. These were the principles of the declaration of independence Kossuth and his followers lived and died for. Don’t you believe that the children of the great Kossuth, the Washington of Hungary; of Klapka, the Wayne of the Magyars, have within their breasts and in the bounding flow of their veins the elements of our most appreciative and liberty-loving, loyal citizenship? Gentlemen, they are here, because they have learned to know, as one of us, our institutions and the American idea taught to them on mother’s knee, in the lives of the Washingtons, the Franklins, and the Hancocks of Hungary. They come here as Kossuth did, driven out by a tyranny worse than was suffered by us when revolution was conceived and the republic bom. I compare their great names with our own, because struggle is the mother of greatness and makes us all akin. I say it because they have been rocked roughly by the same rude barbarous nurse, because they have been trained to hearts of oak and nerves of steel in the same strenuous war for independence and for this reason I champion their cause. They have my unbounded sympathy and admiration, because I believe
