Bethlen Almanac 1997 (Ligonier)
The Hungarian Reformed Federation of America
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 martyrdom endured by a great people for freedom. These children of a heroic ancestry come to us with all 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 Bern, and Klapka, and Dembinski, what did they fight for that would make them alien or 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 born. 1 compare their great names with our own, because struggle is the mother of greatness and makes us all akin. 12
