Appendix Ii.--_extracts From a Letter to the 'times,' Dated December

9th, 1851, by Bartholomew Szemere, late Minister of the Interior in Hungary; in answer to_ Prince Esterhazy.

I shall now proceed to give a succinct account of what took place from April 14, when the new acts received the Royal sanction, to December, 1848. You may be assured that I shall conceal nothing that tended to change the relations between Hungary and Austria.

The Prime Minister was already nominated when Jellachich was raised to the dignity of Ban of Croatia by a Royal decree which the Premier was not even asked to countersign. The Hungarian ministers, nevertheless, for the sake of peace, overlooked this irregular proceeding.

By a decree, dated June 10, 1848, the King made known to all whom it might concern, that all the troops stationed within the kingdom of Hungary, whether Hungarians or Austrians, were placed under the orders of the Hungarian Minister of War, and that all the Hungarian fortresses were under the jurisdiction of the said Minister. Yet at this very time officers of the Imperial and Royal army were taking an active part in the rebellion of the Serbs and Valachs, while General Mayerhofer was enlisting recruits in the principality of Servia, and sending them to assist the rebels. The people thus beheld with astonishment civil war break out, and saw with still greater astonishment that Imperial officers were fighting on both sides.

Jellachich, as a functionary of the Hungarian Crown, refused to obey the Hungarian ministry, and illegally summoned a Croatian Diet to meet at Agram on June 5. In consequence of these proceedings, Ferdinand V., by a decree dated June 10, 1848, deprived him, as a rebel, of all his civil and military offices and dignities, but at the same time sent him, through his Minister of War, Latour, field officers, artillery and ammunition.

The troubles increased daily. The Hungarian ministry requested the Archduke John to act us mediator. He accepted the office, but did nothing.

The Diet met on July 2. The Palatine, as the representative of the Sovereign in the speech from the Throne, said that, as several districts were in a state of open rebellion, the principal objects to which, in the name of His Majesty, he should direct the attention of the Diet were the finances and the defences of the country, and that bills relating to these objects would be brought in by the Ministers. He then proceeded as follows:--"His Majesty has learned with painful feelings, that although he only followed the dictates of his own gracious inclination, when, at the request of the faithful Hungarian people, he gave his sovereign sanction to the laws enacted by the last Diet--laws which the common weal, according to the exigencies of the present age, rendered imperatively necessary--there are, nevertheless, a number of seditious agitators, especially in the annexed territories and the Hungarian districts of the Lower Danube, who, by false reports and terrorism, have excited the different religious sects and races speaking different languages against each other, and, by mendaciously affirming that the above-mentioned laws are not the free expressions of His Majesty's Royal will, have stirred up the people to offer an armed opposition to the execution of the law, and to the legally constituted authorities. And, moreover, that some of these agitators have even proceeded so far in their iniquitous course as to spread the report that this armed opposition has been made in the interests of the dynasty, and with the knowledge, and connivance of His Majesty or of the members of His Majesty's Royal house. I therefore, in order that all the inhabitants of the kingdom, without distinction as to creed or language, may have their minds set at rest, hereby declare, in conformity with the sovereign behest of His Majesty our most gracious King, and in his sovereign name and person, that it is His Majesty's firm and steadfast determination to defend with all his Royal power and authority the unity and integrity of His Royal Hungarian crown against every attack from without, and every attempt at disruption and separation that may be made within the kingdom, and at the same time inviolably to maintain the laws which have received the Royal sanction. And while His Majesty will not suffer any one to curtail the liberties assured to all classes by the law, His Majesty, as well as all the members of His Royal dynasty, strongly condemns the audacity of those who venture to affirm that any illegal act whatsoever or any disrespect of the constituted authorities can be reconcileable with His Majesty's sovereign will, or at all compatible with the interests of the Royal dynasty."

It thus clearly appears that the King acknowledged the validity and the inviolability of the acts passed by the Diet of 1847-8 three months after they had been sanctioned.

Relying on the sincerity of the Royal asseverations, the Diet humbly requested that His Majesty would be graciously pleased to render the country happy by his presence. It was, in fact, the general wish that the King should come to Hungary; even the most radical journals loudly declared that if he came he would be received with enthusiasm bordering on madness.

Meanwhile the rebellion of the Croats, Serbs, and Valachs, was spreading daily, and that, too, in the name of the Sovereign. Generals, colonels, and other field officers of the Imperial army were at the head of it, without any one of them being summoned by the King to answer for his conduct. The eyes of the too credulous natives were now opened, and still more when the King refused to sanction the acts for the levying of troops and raising of funds for the suppression of the rebellion, although the Diet had been convened chiefly for this purpose.

I must here observe that at this period nothing whatever had occurred that could serve as a pretext for the dynasty to support the rebellion. The Diet, it is true, would not consent that the troops that were to be levied should be draughted into the old regiments; but it was obviously impossible for the Diet to consent to any such measures at a period when the rebels were everywhere led by Imperial officers, when the Austrian troops stationed in Hungary, although they had been placed under the orders of the Hungarian Ministry, refused to fight against those rebels, and the commanders of fortresses to receive orders from the Hungarian War-office.

On the 8th of September a deputation from the Hungarian Diet earnestly entreated His Majesty to sanction two acts relating to the levying of troops and taxes. The King refused; but in his answer to the address of the deputation said, "I trust that no one will hereby suppose that I have the intention to set aside or infringe the existing laws. This, I repeat, is far from my intention. On the contrary, it is my firm and determined will to maintain, in conformity with my coronation oath, the laws, the integrity, and the rights of the kingdom, under my Hungarian crown."

The King made this solemn declaration on the 8th of September, and on the 9th of September Jellachich crossed the Drave with 48,000 men to wage war in the King's name on the Hungarian Diet and Ministry. The King had, moreover, on the 4th of September, affixed his sign manual to a letter or Royal mandate addressed to Jellachich, and revoking the decree by which he had been deprived of his civil and military offices and dignities. His Majesty, in this letter, also expressed his high approbation of the Ban's conduct. By a Royal decree, dated October 3, the constitution was suspended, martial law proclaimed, and Jellachich, the rebel, appointed His Majesty's Plenipotentiary Commissary for the kingdom of Hungary, and invested with unlimited authority to act, in the name of His Majesty, within the said kingdom.

Hungary, so far from commencing the revolution, was not even prepared to meet the invasion of the Croatian Ban. He was defeated near Stuhlweissenburg by the Landsturm. The Hungarian Government only began to organize regular troops in October.

That the Diet did not recognize a decree that suspended the constitution and invested Jellachich with the dictatorship, will be found quite natural, if not by you, at least by every Englishman who cherishes constitutional freedom, the more so as its proceedings on this occasion were founded on legal right, viz., on act 4, sect. 6, of 1847-8, which expressly ordains that "the annual session of the Diet shall not be closed, nor the Diet itself dissolved, before the budget for the ensuing year has been voted."

From this short but faithful account of what actually occurred, it clearly appears that the Hungarian nation had not recourse to arms until the Ban of Croatia entered the Hungarian territory with an Austrian-Croatian army. It is also an undeniable fact that until the promulgation of the Austrian Charter in March, 1849--by which, with a stroke of the pen, the independence of Hungary was destroyed, its constitution abolished, and its territories dismembered--the Hungarian nation never demanded anything else than the maintenance of the laws and institutions which its Sovereign had sanctioned and sworn to maintain inviolate. It was however precisely for the purpose of destroying these laws and institutions that the dynasty began the war. This, of course, they did not venture to avow. It was necessary to conceal the real motives of their perfidious conduct from the civilized world. Hence in their public proclamations they always alleged some pretext or other--all of them equally groundless. At the commencement they said that it was only an insignificant faction they had to deal with; but when they saw that the whole nation was arrayed in arms against them, they declared it was for the suppression of demagogueism, propagated by foreigners, chiefly Poles, that their armies had entered Hungary; and to give a colour to this pretext they industriously spread the report that there were 20,000 Poles in the ranks of the Hungarians. When however it became notorious that no more than 1,000 Poles were fighting under our national standard, the Austrian dynasty appeared as the soi-disant champion and judge of the various nationalities or races. This answered well enough until the system of centralization showed too clearly that an attempt would be made to Germanize these nationalities; when the dynasty again veered about, and, leaving "nationalities" in the lurch, took up the peasantry. We consequently find the Austrian Government assuring the Washington Cabinet (in the note of July 4, 1851) that they had waged war on Hungary in order to crush a turbulent aristocracy that "preach democracy with their tongues, while their whole lives consist in the daily exercise over their fellow-men of arbitrary power in the most repugnant form." This last pretext, so ostentatiously put forth, loses, however, even its plausibility when contrasted with the policy of the dynasty in 1848, for it is an undoubted fact that, although the reforms effected in our political institutions at that period were consented to by the dynasty without much hesitation, it required the most energetic remonstrances on the part of the Diet to obtain the Royal sanction to the act for the liberation of the peasants from feudal bondage.

It is precisely to the fact of all classes, without distinction, being equally aware of the cabals of the dynasty, that may be ascribed the success of the Hungarian insurrection. It was not one man, nor a party, nor a conspiracy, nor terrorism, that awakened that spontaneous enthusiasm with which the people rushed to arms. Kossuth may have been the rallying cry; but he was not the cause of the war. For several months the people had witnessed the equivocal conduct of the dynasty; had seen that its words were belied by its deeds; had seen that the rebels were everywhere led by Imperial officers; and finally beheld Jellachich, a high functionary of the Hungarian Crown, invade the country at the head of an Austro-Croatian army. It was then, and not till then, that the nation cried, as with one voice--the King is a traitor. From that day began the Hungarian revolution. On that day the monarchical feeling was extinguished. What no one had thought it possible to accomplish was accomplished by the dynasty itself.

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