exile, first responded, in a speech full of animosity against England.
After him Mr. DANA made the following speech, which may be a useful
comment on that of Kossuth.

My friend, who has taken his seat, spoke in his own right as a political
exile from Ireland, a country than which none has more deeply suffered
from the woes of foreign domination. I speak here by no such title. And
yet if any man may without presumption claim to speak in behalf of the
political exiles and rebels against tyranny, of several nations, of all
nations, indeed it is an American. For he is not only himself the heir
of a nation of rebels, but his whole lineage is cosmopolitan, and he may
boast that he is akin to all the races of Europe. We have no exclusive
origin, thank God! In the veins of our country there flows the blood of
a thousand tribes, just as our language is made up of a thousand idioms.
We hear a good deal from certain quarters about the greatness of races,
the practical energy of this race, the artistic genius of the other, and
the great intellectual qualities of another. America disproves of all
these dogmas, and establishes in their stead the higher principle that
all races are capable of a noble development under noble institutions.
Give freedom to the Celt, the Slavon, or the Italian, or whatever other
people; give them freedom and independence; establish among them the
great principle of _local self-government_, and the earth does not
more surely revolve in its orbit than they will in due time ripen into
all the excellence and all the dignity of humanity. Men make and control
institutions, but institutions in their turn make men. And if a people
under Providence are endowed with institutions that have given free play
and healthy growth to the most useful and admirable powers of man, it is
not for that people to boast of its race as better than other races, and
thank God, like the Pharisee, that it is not as other men. No, it is for
that people to see the cause of its good fortune in its institutions,