alth on the altar of their
fatherland. Every jewel, every ornament was brought forth, but still the
tribune judged it necessary to pass a law prohibiting the ladies of Rome
to wear more than half an ounce of gold, or particoloured splendid
dresses. Now, we wanted in Hungary no such law. The women of Hungary
brought all that they had. You would have been astonished to see how, in
the most wealthy houses of Hungary, if you were invited to dinner, you
would be forced to eat soup with iron spoons. When the wounded and the
sick--and many of them we had, because we fought hard--when the wounded
and the sick were not so well provided as it would have been our duty
and our pleasure to do, I ordered the respective public functionaries to
take care of them. But the poor wounded went on suffering, and the
proper officers were but slow in providing for them. When I saw this,
one single word was spoken to the ladies of Hungary, and in a short time
there was provision made for hundreds of thousands of sick. And I never
met a single mother who would have withheld her son from sharing in the
battle; but I have met many who ordered and commanded their children to
fight for their fatherland. I saw many and many brides who urged on the
bridegrooms to delay their day of happiness till they should come back
victorious from the battles of their fatherland. Thus acted the ladies
of Hungary. A country deserves to live; a country deserves to have a
future, when the women, as much as the men, love and cherish it.

But I have a stronger motive than all these to claim your protecting
sympathy for my country's cause. It is her nameless woe, nameless
sufferings. In the name of that ocean of bloody tears which the impious
hand of the tyrant wrung from the eyes of the childless mothers, of the
brides who beheld the executioner's sword between them and their wedding
day--in the name of all these mothers, wives, brides, daughters, and
sisters, who, by thousands of thousands, weep over the graves of Magyars
so dear to their hearts,--who weep the bloody tears of a patriot (as
they all are) over the face of their beloved native land--in the name of
all those torturing stripes with which the flogging hand of Austrian
tyrants dared to outrage human nature in the womankind of my native
land--in the name of that daily curse against Austria with which even
the prayers of our women are mixed--in the name of the nameless
sufferings of my own dear wife [here the wh