Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/157

BRYANT the demands of the Russians. Immediately a funeral gloom settled like a noonday darkness upon the city. I heard the muttered exclama- tions of the people, " It is all over — the last hope of European liberty is gone.*' Russia did not misjudge. If she had allowed Hungary to become independent, or free, the reaction in favor of absolutism had been incom- plete; there would have been one perilous ex- ample of successful resistance to despotism — in one comer of Europe a flame would have been kept alive, at which the other nations might have rekindled, among themselves, the light of liberty. Hungary was subdued; but does anyone who hears me believe that the present state of things in Europe will last? The despots themselves fear that it will not; and made cruel by their fears, are heaping chain on chain around the limbs of their subjects. They are hastening the event they dread. Every added shackle gaUs, into a more fiery impotence, those who wear them. I look with mingling hope and horror to the day — a day bloodier, perhaps, than we have yet seen — when the exasperated nations shall snap their chains and start to their feet. It may well be that Hungary, made less patient of the yoke by the remembrance of her own many and glorious struggles for independence, and better fitted than other nations, by the peculiar structure of her institutions, for founding the liberty of her citizens on a rational basis, will take the 147