ese proceedings, which caused the rights of the country to moulder
uselessly in its parchments; by the change,[*] these rights and the
royal oath were both to become a reality. It was the apprehension of
this, and especially the fear of losing its control over the money and
blood of the country, which caused the house of Austria to resolve on
involving Hungary, by the foulest intrigues, in the horrors of fire and
slaughter, that, having plunged the country in a civil war, it might
seize the opportunity to dismember the kingdom, and to blot out the name
of Hungary from the list of independent nations, and unite its plundered
and bleeding limbs with the Austrian monarchy.

[Footnote *: The change was solemnly enacted in the Parliamentary Laws of
March, 1848, which King Ferdinand V. sanctioned by his public oath in
April, 1848.]

The beginning of this course was, (after a Ministry had been called into
existence), by ordering an Austrian general [Jellachich] to rise in
rebellion against the laws of the country and nominating him Ban of
Croatia, a kingdom belonging to the kingdom of Hungary.***

The Ban revolted therefore in the name of the emperor, and rebelled
openly against the king of Hungary, who is however one and the same
person; and he went so far as to decree the separation of Croatia and
Slavonia from _Hungary_, with which they had been united for eight
hundred years, as well as to incorporate them with the _Austrian_
empire. Public opinion and undoubted facts threw the blame of these
proceedings on the Archduke Louis, uncle to the emperor, on his brother,
the Archduke Francis Charles, and especially on the consort of the
last-named prince, the Archduchess Sophia; and since the Ban, in this
act of rebellion, openly alleged that he acted as a faithful subject of
the emperor, the ministry of Hungary requested their sovereign, by a
public declaration, to wipe off the stigma which these proceedings threw
upon the family. At that moment affairs were not prosperous for Austria
in Italy; the emperor therefore did proclaim that the Ban and his
associates were guilty of high treason, and of exciting to rebellion.
But while publishing this edict, the Ban and his accomplices were
covered with favours at court, and supplied for their enterprise with
money, arms, and ammunition. The Hungarians, confiding in the royal
proclamation, and not wishing to provoke a civil conflict, did not hunt
out those proscribed traitors in their