future; but the universality of education: for a whole people, once
become intelligent, never can consent not to be free. You will always be
willing to be free, and you are great and powerful enough to be as good
as your will.

My humble prayers in my country's cause I address to your entire nation:
but you, gentlemen, are the engineers through whom my cause must reach
them. It is therefore highly gratifying to me to see, not isolated men,
but the powerful complex of the great word PRESS, granting me this
important manifestation of generous sentiment. I beg you to consider,
that whatever and wherever I speak, is _always_ spoken to the
press; and for all the imperfections of my language let me plead for
your indulgence, as one of your professional colleagues: for indeed such
I have been.

Yes, gentlemen; I commenced my public career as a journalist. You, under
your happy institutions, know not the torment of writing with hands
fettered by an Austrian censor. To sit at the desk, with a heart full of
the necessity of the moment, a conscience stirred with righteous
feeling, a mind animated with convictions and principles, and a whole
soul warmed by a patriot's fire;--to see before your eyes the scissors
of the censor ready to lop your ideas, maim your arguments, murder your
thoughts, render vain your laborious days and sleepless nights;--to know
that the people will judge you, not by what you have felt, thought,
written, but by what the censor will let you say;--to perceive that the
prohibition has no rule or limit but the arbitrary pleasure of a man who
is doomed by profession to be a coward and a fool;--oh! his little
scissors suspended over one are a worse misery than the sword of
Damocles. Oh! to go on, day by day, in such a work of Sisyphus, believe
me, is no small sacrifice of any intelligent man to fatherland and