y institutions, know not the torment of writing with hands
fettered by an Austrian censor. To sit at the desk, with a heart full of
the necessity of the moment, a conscience stirred with righteous
feeling, a mind animated with convictions and principles, and a whole
soul warmed by a patriot's fire;--to see before your eyes the scissors
of the censor ready to lop your ideas, maim your arguments, murder your
thoughts, render vain your laborious days and sleepless nights;--to know
that the people will judge you, not by what you have felt, thought,
written, but by what the censor will let you say;--to perceive that the
prohibition has no rule or limit but the arbitrary pleasure of a man who
is doomed by profession to be a coward and a fool;--oh! his little
scissors suspended over one are a worse misery than the sword of
Damocles. Oh! to go on, day by day, in such a work of Sisyphus, believe
me, is no small sacrifice of any intelligent man to fatherland and
humanity. And this is the present condition of the press, not in Hungary
only, but in all countries cursed by Austrian rule. Indeed, our recent
reforms gave freedom of the press, not to my fatherland only, but
indirectly to Vienna, Prague, Lemberg; in a word, to the whole empire of
Austria and this must ensure your sympathy to us. Contrariwise, the
interference of Russia has crushed the press on the whole European
continent. Freedom of the press is incompatible with the preponderance
of Russia, and with the very existence of the Austrian dynasty, the
sworn enemy of every liberal thought. This must engage your generous
support to sweep away those tyrants, and to raise liberty where now foul
oppression rules.

Some time back there appeared in certain New York papers systematic
falsehoods, which went so far as to state that we, the Hungarians, had
struggled for oppression, while it was the Austrian dynasty which stood
up for liberty! Such effrontery astonishes even one who has seen
Russian treacheries. We may be misrepresented, scorned, jeered at,
censured. Our martyrs, whose blood cries for revenge, may be laughed at
as fools. Heroes, who will command the veneration of history, may be
called Don Quixotes. But that among freemen and professed republicans
even the honour of an unfortunate nation, in its most mournful
suffering, should not be sacred,--that is indeed a sorrowful page in
human history.

You cannot expect me to enter into a special refutation of this compound