THIS WEEK'S ANNIVERSARY

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 64, 21 March 1929, Page 4

THIS WEEK'S ANNIVERSARY

A CONTINENTAL HERO. THE HUNGARIAN INSURRECTION. Louise Kossuth who was Dictator of Hungary for the greater part of the insurrection which broke out in 1849, died on March 20th, 1,894., The failure of the rebellion, through the intervention of Russia, called up a/ wide and deep feeling of regret and indignation in England, English people, says Justin McCarthy, had very generally sympathised v&fi hhe cause of the Hungarians and rejoiced in the victories which np to a certain point the arms of the insurgents had won. When the Hungarians were put down at last, not by The strength of Austria, hut 115 the intervention of Russia, the anger of Englishmen in general found loud-spoken expression. Kossuth, who represented, in the English mind at least, the cause of Hungary and her national independence came to England. He was received at Southampton, in Birmingham, in London, with an enthusiasm such as no foreigner except Garibaldi alone has ever drawn in our time from the English people. HANDSOME AND ELOQUENT. There was much in Kossuth himself as well as in his cause to attract the enthusiasm of popular assemblages. He had a_ strikingly handsome face and stately presence. He was undoubtedly one of the most eloquent men ho ever addressed a popular audience. In one of his imprisonments he had studied the English language, chiefly from the pages of Shakespeare. He had mastered our tongue as few foreigners have ever been able t.o do; but what h© had mastered was not the common colloquial •English of the streets and the drawing-rooms. The English he spoke was the noblest in its style from which a student could supply his eloquence. He could address a public meeting for an hour or more with a fluency not inferior, seemingly, to that of Gladstone, with a measured dignity and well-restrained force that were not unworthy of Bright; and in curiously expressive, stately, powerful, pathetic English which sounded as if it belonged to a higher time and to loftier interests than oars.

AUSTRIANS ALARMED. Kossuth’s reception in England excited wild anger and alarm among Austrian statesmen, hut Lord Palmerston, the English Foreign Secrotary, regarded the Austra-ian’s anger and fears with a contempt which he took no pains to conceal. The English public never had any serious notion of going to war with Austria in obedience to Kossuth’s lappeal. They sympathised with the causa which they understood him to represent, and were taken with his really eloquence. The 'enthusiasm cooled down after a while, as was, indeed, inevitable. The time was no far off when Kossuth was to make vain a peals to almost empty halls, and when the eloquence that once could cram the largest building with excited admirers was to call aloud to solitude. There came a time when Kossuth lived in England forgotten and unnoticed; when his passing away from England was unobserved, as his presence there had long been. There seems, one can hardly help something cruel in this w r a,y of suddenly fairing up the representative of some foreign cause, the spokesman of some “mission,” and then, when- he has been filled with vain hopes, letting him drop down to disappointment negle,ct. It was not, perhaps, the fault of the English people if Kossuth mistook, as many another man in like circumstances has done, th« meaning 0 f English popular sympathy.