Fraternity-Testvériség, 2002 (80. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
2002-01-01 / 1. szám
Page 10 TESTVÉRISÉG in Cleveland and New York City. His bust is in a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol building, the home of our national legislature. There are streets and parks, even towns, named after Kossuth throughout our country, including a street in my own home town. Such a man deserves - in fact, cries out - to be considered in terms of his present relevance, rather than just an historical perspective. Perhaps the best way to take the measure of this great man is from his own words uttered while visiting these shores a century and a half ago. First, I would like to read some excerpts from Kossuth’s address to the Legislative Banquet of the United States House of Representatives, held 150 years ago this evening in this very city: “Happy is your great country, sir, for being so warmly attached to that great principle of self-government. Upon this foundation your fathers raised a home for freedom more glorious than the world has ever seen. Happy is your great country, sir, that it was selected by the blessing of the Lord to prove the glorious practicability of a federative union of many sovereign states, all preserving their state-rights and their self- government, and yet united in one. Every star beaming with its own luster, but altogether one constellation on mankind’s canopy.” “No Hungarian whom his nation honored with its confidence was ever seduced by ambition to become dangerous to his country’s liberty. That is a remarkable fact, and yet it is not accidental. It springs from the proper influence of institutions on the national character. Our nation, through all its history, was educated in the school of local self-government, and in such a country grasping ambition having no field, has no place in man’s character. The truth of this doctrine becomes yet more illustrated by a quite contrary historical fact in France. Whatever have been the changes of government in that great country - and many have been to be sure-we have seen a Convention, a Directorate, Consuls, and one Consul, and an Emperor, and the restoration, and the Citizen-King, and the Republic. Through all these different experiments centralization was the keynote of the institutions of France. Power always centralized, omnipotence always vested somewhere. And, remarkable indeed, France has never raised one single man to the seat of power, who has not sacrificed his country’s freedom to his personal ambition.” “Well, God’s will will be done! The heart may break, but duty will be done. We will stand our pace, though to us in Europe there be no fair play. But so much I hope, that no just man on earth can ever charge me with unbecoming arrogance when here, on this soil of freedom, I kneel down and raise my prayer to God: ‘Almighty Father of Humanity, will Thy merciful arm not raise up a power on earth, to protect the law of nations, when there are so many to violate it?’ It is a prayer and nothing else. What would remain to the oppressed if they were not even permitted to pray?” “Upon our plains we fought decisive battles for Christendom. There will be fought the decisive battle for independence of nations, for state rights, for international law, and for democratic liberty. We will live free or die like men, but should my people be doomed to die, it will be the first whose death will not be recorded as suicide, but as a martyrdom for the world, and future ages will mourn over the sad fate of the Magyars, doomed to perish, not because we deserved it, but because in the nineteenth century, there was nobody to protect the Taws of nature and of nature's God’.” “I trust in the future of my native land, because I know that it is worthy to have one, and that it is necessary to the destinies of humanity.” I would also like to quote from Kossuth’s first speech upon his arrival in America in December, 1851: “Let me, before I go to work, have some hours of rest upon this soil of freedom, your happy home. Freedom and home; what heavenly music in those two words! Alas! I have no home, and the freedom of my people is downtrodden. Young Giant of free America, do not tell me that thy shores are an asylum to the oppressed and a home to the homeless exile. An asylum it is; but Unveiling ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, March 15, 1990.
