e expression of your kind address,
personal to myself. You named me "Kossuth, Governor of Hungary."

My nomination to be Governor was not to gratify ambition. Never,
perhaps, did I feel sadder, than at the moment when that title was
conferred upon me; for I compared my feeble faculties and its high
responsibilities. It is therefore not from ambition that I thank you for
the title, but because the title rests upon our Declaration of
Independence; and by acknowledging it as mine, you recognize the
rightfulness and validity of that Declaration. And, gentlemen I frankly
declare that your whole people are bound in honour and duty to recognize
it. At this moment there is no other legitimate existing law in Hungary.
It was not the proclamation of a man or of a party. It was the solemn
declaration of the whole nation in _Congress_ assembled. It was
sanctioned by _every village_, and by _every municipality_. No
counter-proclamation has gone forth from Hungary. It has been overturned
solely by the invasion of an ambitious _foreign_ power, the Czar of
Russia; who can no more legitimately make or unmake a governor of
Hungary, than General Santa Anna, if in your late war he had forced his
way to Washington, could have unmade President Taylor. None of you will
admit that violence can destroy righteousness: it can but establish
unlawful, unrightful _fact_. If so,--if your own people, and not
foreign invaders, are the source of rightful law to _you_,--you
must in consistency recognize _our_ Independence as legitimate, and
its declaration as our still rightful law.

As to the praises which you were so kind as to bestow upon me, it is no
affectation in me when I declare that I am not conscious of having any
other merit than that of being a plain, straightforward man, a faithful
friend of freedom, a good patriot. And these qualities, gentlemen, are
so natural to _every_ honest man, that it is scarcely worth while
to speak of them; for I cannot conceive how a man with understanding and
with a sound heart, can be anything else than a good patriot and a lover
of freedom.

Yet my humble capacity has not preserved me from calumnies. Scarcely had
I arrived here, when I learned that I had been charged in the United
States with being an _irreligious man_. So long as despots exist,
and have the means to pay, they will find men to calumniate those who
are opposed to tyranny. But, suppose I were the most dishonest creature
in the world; in the na