“But if in your expectations I should become a screen to divert, for a single moment, your attention from my country’s cause and attract it to myself, I entreat you, even here, to forget me, and bestow all your attention and your generous sympathy upon the cause of my downtrodden fatherland.”
Kossuth gave rise to just criticism in that he appealed too often and too elaborately to the local and national pride of his audiences. This criticism was applicable to his speeches in England and in America.
In every attempt to fix Kossuth’s place in the list of historical orators,—and in that list he must have a conspicuous place,—certain considerations cannot be disregarded, viz.:
First, he spoke to England and America in a language that he acquired when he had already passed the middle period of life. The weight of this impediment he felt when he said, “Spirit of American eloquence, frown not at my boldness that I dare abuse Shakespeare’s language in Faneuil Hall.”
Second, we are to consider the amount of work performed in a brief period of time, and the conditions under which it was performed. Between the twenty-fifth day of April and the fourteenth day of May, 1852, Kossuth delivered thirty speeches in Massachusetts, containing, on an average, more than two thousand words in each speech, and not a sentence inappropriate to the occasion. These speeches were prepared and written in the intervals between the ceremonial proceedings, which occurred as often as every day.
Third, though his theme had many aspects, and these varying aspects Kossuth presented with such skill as to command the attention of his hearers, yet his theme was always the same,—the wrongs of Hungary.
On the twentieth, the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth days of May, 1859, Kossuth delivered speeches in London, Manchester, and Bradford, England. The Lord Mayor presided at the meeting in London, and the meetings one and all
