ery time, like
Providence. Tyrants are not in the midst of you to throw the apple of
discord and raise hatred in this national family, hatred of
_races_, that curse of humanity, that venomous ally of despotism.
Glorious it is to see the oppressed of diverse countries,--diverse in
language, history, habits,--wandering to these shores, and becoming
members of this great nation, regenerated by the principle of common
liberty.
If language alone makes a nation, then there is no great nation on
earth: for there is no country whose population is counted by millions,
but speaks more than one language. No! It is not language only.
Community of interests, of rights, of duties, of history, but chiefly
community of institutions; by which a population, varying perhaps in
tongue and race, is bound together through daily intercourse in the
towns, which are the centres and home of commerce and industry:--besides
these, the very mountain-ranges, the system of rivers and streams,--the
soil, the dust of which is mingled with the mortal remains of those
ancestors who bled on the same field, for the same interests, the common
inheritance of glory and of woe, the community of laws and institutions,
common freedom or common oppression:--all this enters into the complex
idea of Nationality.
That this is instinctively felt by the common sense of the people,
nowhere is more manifestly shown than at this very moment in my native
land. Hungary was declared by Francis Joseph of Austria _no more to
exist_ as a Nation, no more as a State. It was and is put under
martial law. Strangers, aliens to our laws and history as well as to our
tongue, rule now, where our fathers lived and our brothers bled. To be a
Hungarian is become almost a crime in our own native land. Well: to
justify before the world the extinction of Hungary, the partition of its
territory, and the reincorporating of the dissected limbs into the
common body of servitude, the treacherous dynasty was anxious to show
that the Hungarians are in a minority in their own land. They hoped that
intimidation and terrorism would induce even the very Magyars to disavow
their language and birth. They ordered a census of races to be made.
They performed it with the iron rule of martial law; and dealt so
arbitrarily that thousands of women and men, who professed to be
Magyars, who professed not to know any other language than the Magyar,
were, notwithstanding all their protestation, put down as Sc
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