Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/304

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS ambition and undoubted possibilities. A picture, indeed, of hope and self-confidence.

Between these two states of a nation stands a man whose name was Louis Kossuth. Behold and compare: the difference says who he was; he found the former, he created the latter.

Not he alone; certainly not. It would be sin to be wanting in piety on that day devoted to piety, to express gratitude toward one great man by discarding gratitude due to other great men. There have been many of them as co-workers in the great work of regeneration; some with Kossuth, some against him, but animated all of them by the same holy spirit of patriotism.

Kossuth is one of the founders of our nation; he has made her secure of her independence and of her moral connection with the sister nations; he has made her an active agent in the great work of human progress and, by linking her destinies to the highest aspirations of our kind, has laid her future on a foundation of indestructible strength. His name is a symbol of our nation's worth to the world; of her racial individuality and of her task in universal history. There lies the secret of the veneration this name encounters throughout the world and of the gratitude and enthusiastic love it will never cease to pour forth from the hearts of our people. 264