Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/156

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS at the feet of the Tsar. Europe was at that time in the midst of the reaction; the ebb-tide was rushing violently back, sweeping all that the friends of freedom had planned into the black bosom of the deep. In France the liberty of the Press was extinct — Paris in a state of siege — the soldiery of that Republic had just quenched in blood the freedom of Rome— Austria had suppressed liberty in northern Italy — absolutism was restored in Russia, along the Rhine, and in the towns and villages of Wiirtemberg and Bavaria, troops withdrawn from the barracks and garrisons fiUed the streets and kept the inhabitants quiet with the bayonet at their breast. Hungary at that moment alone upheld, and upheld with a firm hand and dauntless heart, the blazing torch of liberty. To Hungary were turned the eyeSy to Hungary clung the hopes of all who did not despair of the freedom of Europe. I recollect that while the armies of Russia were moving like a tempest from the North upon the Hungarian host, the progress of events was watched with the deepest solicitude by the people of Germany. I was at that time in Munich, the splendid capital of Bavaria. The Germans seemed for the time to have put off their usual character, and scrambled for the daily prints, wet from the press, with such eagerness that I almost thought myself in America. The news of the catastrophe at last arrived; Gorgey had betrayed the cause of Hungary and yielded to 146