mere conglomerate of populations. It may be that our wealth would increase, but this prospect does not attract me. Before all else, fidelity to my race!" Progress, in any department of life, was but a means to the preservation of the race. This appears to have been the central idea in Széchenyi's mind, as in the minds of his contemporaries, and when that idea came into contact with other noble ideas, it helped to strengthen them.
The rearing of the edifice of the new state demanded incalculable labour, enterprise, self-denial and self-sacrifice. It is an old idea, which exists in the popular legends, that to make the foundations of a building strong, the sacrifice of human life is necessary. True it is that the Hungary of to-day has been baptized with the blood of her children. The sacrifice which her establishment demanded, and which was ungrudgingly given, was the lives of her noblest sons.
So great a result could only be achieved by a combination of splendid talents and great characters. Sacrifice we see everywhere, from the time when Kazinczy was flung into the fortress of Kufstein, to the time when Madách, also. confined in a political prison, wrote his immortal Tragedy of Man. Many a poet besides Kazinczy and Madách found his way into prison: Verseghy, Bacsányi, and Szentjóbi-Szabó, who died in his chains. Half a century later, Petőfi, Hungary's greatest lyric poet, died on the battlefield, laid low by a Russian bullet or the lance of a Cossack. The greatest statesman, Széchenyi, in consequence of mental strain due to excessive labour and anxiety, lost his reason. The noblest patriots were imprisoned or exiled.
Naturally the great sons of this great epoch ware filled
