You will recollect that about a year ago I made, through the 
columns of the Tribune,* some curious revelations in regard to a 
certain Bangya, his mission to Circassia and the squabbles hence 
arising between the Hungarian and Polish emigrations at Constan- 
tinople. Although the facts then stated by me afterward found 
their way into the European press, no attempt to dispute their 
accuracy has ever been ventured upon. I have now to call the 
attention of your readers to another secret chapter of contem- 
poraneous history; I mean the connection between Kossuth and 
Bonaparte. It cannot longer be tolerated that the same men 
should receive with the one hand the pay of the assassin of the 
French Republic, and in the other hand hoist the banner of 
liberty; that they should play the part of both martyrs and 
courtiers; that, having become the tools of an atrocious usurper, 
they should still exhibit themselves as the organs of an oppressed 
nation. I think the moment the more opportune for revealing 
facts long known to me, as Bonaparte and his sycophants, Kossuth 
and his partisans, are equally busy in throwing a vail over 
transactions which could not fail to compromise the one before the 
monarchs, and the other before the peoples of the world. 

It will be admitted by the most prejudiced admirers of Mr. 
Kossuth that, whatever his other accomplishments may be, he has 
always sadly lacked one great quality—that of consistency. During 
the whole course of his life he has more resembled the 
improvisatore receiving his impressions from his audience than the 
author imprinting his own original ideas upon the world. This 

inconsistency of thought could not but reflect itself in duplicity of 
action. A few facts may illustrate the truth of this assertion. At 
Kutaya, Mr. Kossuth entered into an intimate liaison with Mr. 
David Urquhart, and, accepting at once the prejudices of that 
romantic Highlander, he did not hesitate to pass sentence on 
Mazzini as a Russian agent. He formally pledged himself to keep 
aloof from Mazzini. But he had hardly arrived at London when he 
formed a triumvirate with Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin.*” The 
incontestable proots of this double-dealing have been laid before 
the British public in the correspondence carried on between 
L. Kossuth and David Urquhart, which the latter gentleman has 
printed in the London Free Press.* In the first speech Mr. Kossuth 
made on landing on the English coast, he called Palmerston the 
friend of his bosom. Palmerston, through the instrumentality of a 
well-known member of Parliament,? intimated to Kossuth his 
desire to receive the latter at his mansion. Kossuth demanded to 
be received by the British Minister as Governor of Hungary, a 
request which, of course, was at once scornfully rejected. Mr. 
Kossuth, on his part, now gave, through Mr. Urquhart and other 
acquaintances of his, the British public to understand that he had 
rejected Palmerston’s invitation because he had made sure, from a 
close study at Kutaya of the Blue Book relating to Hungarian 
affairs,© that Palmerston, the “friend of his bosom,” had, in secret 
understanding with the Court of St. Petersburg, played the traitor 
to “dear Hungary.” In 1853, when a Mazzinian émeute broke out 
at Milan, there appeared on the walls of that town a proclamation 
addressed to the Hungarian soldiers, calling upon them to side 
with the Italian insurrectionists,©° and bearing the signature of 
Lajos Kossuth.°” The émeute turning out a failure, Mr. Kossuth, 
through the medium of the London newspapers, hastened to 
declare the proclamation a forgery, thus giving a public démenti to 
his friend Mazzini. Nevertheless, the proclamation was genuine. 
Mazzini had acted in concert with Kossuth. 

Proceeding upon the settled conviction that to subvert Austrian 

May 12, 1858.— Ed. 

tyranny the united action of Hungary and Italy was indispensable, 
Mazzini for some time tried to replace Kossuth by a more 
trustworthy Hungarian leader, but his efforts splitting on the 
dissensions of the Hungarian emigration, he magnanimously 
pardoned his uncertain ally, and spared him an exposure that 
would have ruined Kossuth’s position in England. 

To draw nearer to present times, I may call to your recollection 
that, in the Autumn of 1858, Mr. Kossuth made a tour through 
Scotland, delivering lectures in different towns, and solemnly 
warning the British against Louis Bonaparte’s treacherous designs. 
Take, for instance, the following extract of a lecture delivered at 
Glasgow, on Nov. 20, 1858: 

“T have,” said Mr. Kossuth, “already alluded, in my other lecture, to the broth 
of national hatred which Louis Bonaparte is brewing. I do not mean to insinuate 
that he is meditating an invasion of this country: no doubt he would; only, like the 
fox in the fable,” he does not like sour grapes. It is not long ago that, with the 
exception, perhaps, of the gentlemen of St. Petersburg, who very likely know all 
about the mystery, Louis Bonaparte put the whole diplomacy of the world to their 
wits’ end by his gigantic preparations at Cherbourg, pushed on to the last shilling 
of his empty treasury, and with a haste as if his existence was depending on a 
minute gained.... Cherbourg remains a structure solely against England.... He 
meditates a new conflict in the East, in company with Russia. In this conflict he 
means to check the free movement of the English navy by binding a goodly portion 
of it to your shores, while he proposes to strike a deadly blow at your vital interests 
in the East.... The Crimean war—was it concluded according to the interests of 
Great Britain and Turkey? Wallachia and Moldavia got a constitution devised in 
the den of secret diplomacy, that curse of our age; a constitution devised by 
Bonaparte with the concurrence of Russia and Austria—each and all of them 
ardent friends of popular freedom, forsooth! It is in reality no more nor less than 
a charter granted to Russia for the purpose of disposing of the Principalities.... 
Nay, more; has not Bonaparte, the dear ally, sent his officers to Montenegro to 
teach rifle practice to the wild mountaineers!... His mind is bent on a new treaty of 
Tilsit, if he has it not already in his pocket.” 

Such were Kossuth’s public strictures on Bonaparte, his dear 
ally, in the Autumn of 1858. Still more; in the beginning of 1859, 
when Bonaparte’s plans for his Italian crusade of liberty had 
begun to take shape and figure, this same Kossuth, in Mazzini’s 
Pensiero ed Azione, denounced the Dutch trickster in glowing 
language, and warned all true Republicans—Italians, Hungarians, 
and Germans even—from making themselves the cat’s-paws of the 
Imperial Quasimodo. In a word, he reechoed Mazzini’s views, 
which the latter again proclaimed in his manifesto of the 16th of 

May,’ which he clung to during the Bonaparte crusade, and 
repeated victoriously at the end of the war in another manifesto 
reprinted by the Tribune. 

Kossuth then, in January, 1859, not only saw through the 
Bonapartist sham, but did all in his power to lay it bare before the 
world. He goaded “the liberal press” into that direction afterward 
wondered at by Bonaparte’s tools as “a sudden outbreak” of 
“anti-Napoleonic rage,” and stigmatized by them as a symptom of 
morbid “sympathy for Austria.” But, in the interval, between 
January, 1859, and May, 1859, a strange revolution occurred in 
the feelings and ideas of the grand improvisatore. He who, to warn 
the British against Bonaparte’s atrocious designs, had made a 
lecturing tour through Scotland in the Autumn of 1858, set out in 
the month of May, 1859, on another lecturing tour, from the 
London Mansion House to the Free-Trade Hall at Manchester,?” 
to preach confidence in the Man of December, and, under the 
false pretense of standing up for neutrality, inveigle the British 
over to the side of the Imperial blackleg. His own neutrality he 
soon after evinced in a manner not to be misunderstood. 

Now, these recollections, which I might multiply at pleasure, 
ought to raise some misgivings in the minds of Kossuth’s honest 
admirers—such men as are neither blind worshipers of a name, 
nor bound to the democratic grandee by sordid interest. At all 
events, they will not deny that the facts I am now about to relate 
appear by no means incompatible with the past of the presumed 
hero of liberty. There were three Hungarian leaders at Paris, 
paying court to the illustrious Plon-Plon, alias the Prince Rouge, the 
scion of the Bonapartist family, upon whom has fallen the lot of 
coquetting with revolution, in the same way that his bigger cousin 
dallies with “religion, order, and property.” Those three men 
were Col. Kiss, Count Teleki, and Gen. Klapka. Plon-Plon, be it 
said, en passant, is a Heliogabalus as to morals, an Ivan III for 
personal cowardice, a real Bonaparte for falsehood; but, with all 
that, an homme d’esprit, as the French say. These three gentlemen 
prevailed upon Plon-Plon, who, probably, was not at all taken by 
surprise, to enter into negotiations with Kossuth, to summon him 
to Paris, and even to hold out the promise of presenting the 
ex-Governor of Hungary to the insidious ruler of the Tuileries. 

Accordingly, Mr. Kossuth, having been provided with an 
English passport wherein he was designated as Mr. Brown, left 
London for Paris in the beginning of May. At Paris he had at first 

a long interview with Plon-Plon, to whom he exposed his views 
about insurging Hungary by landing 40,000 Frenchmen, to be 
backed by a corps of Magyar refugees, on the coast of Fiume, and 
a point that seemed uppermost in his patriotic mind, of forming, 
if only for appearance sake, a provisional Government with Mr. 
Kossuth at its head. In the evening of May 3, Plon-Plon, in his 
own carriage, conducted Mr. Kossuth to the Tuileries, there to 
introduce him to the Man of December. During this interview with 
Louis Bonaparte, Mr. Kossuth for once refrained from using his 
great rhetorical powers, and allowed Plon-Plon to act as his 
spokesman. He afterward paid a gracious compliment to the 
almost literal fidelity with which the Prince had reproduced his 
views. 

Having attentively listened to the exposition of his cousin, Louis 
Bonaparte declared that there was one great obstruction to the 
acceptance on his part of Mr. Kossuth’s projects, viz., the latter’s 
Republican principles and Republican connections. It was then 
that Mr. Kossuth most solemnly abjured the Republican faith, 
declaring that he neither was nor ever had been a Republican, and 
that political necessities only, and a strange combination of 
circumstances, had compelled him to side for a while with the 
Republican part of the European emigration. Simultaneously, in 
proof of his anti-Republicanism, he, in the name of his country, 
offered the Hungarian crown to Prince Plon-Plon: It is true that 
the crown he thus disposed of had not yet become vacant, while 
his power of attorney to barter it away was altogether wanting; but 
whoever has carefully watched Mr. Kossuth’s proceedings in 
foreign countries, must have become aware that he has long been 
used to speak of “dear Hungary” somewhat in the way in which a 
country gentleman speaks of his estates. 

As to Mr. Kossuth’s repudiation of Republicanism, I consider it 
to have been sincere. A civil list of 300,000 florins, which he 
claimed at Pesth for keeping up the splendor of the Executive; the 
patronage of the hospitals, transferred from an Austrian Arch- 
duchess* to his own sister’; the attempt to give his name to 
some regiments; his desire to surround himself with a camarilla; 
the tenacity with which, when on foreign soil, he clung to the title 
of Governor, although resigned by him at the epoch of the 
Hungarian catastrophe; the airs assumed by him of a pretender, 
rather than an exile—all this points to tendencies the reverse of 

Republicanism. However that may be, I positively affirm that 
Louis Kossuth abjured Republicanism before the French usurper, 
and in the presence of the Man of December offered the 
Hungarian crown to Plon-Plon, the Bonapartist Sardanapalus. 
Some rather loose gossip about this incident of his interview with 
Bonaparte at the Tuileries may have given rise to the notoriously 
false rumor that Kossuth had betrayed the secret plans of his 
Republican ex-confederates. He was not called upon to reveal 
their supposed secrets, nor would he have listened to such an 
infamous proposal. Having succeeded in completely destroying 
Louis Napoleon’s apprehensions as to his Republican tendencies, 
and having pledged himself to act in the dynastic interest of the 
Bonapartes, a bargain was struck, by which three millions of francs 
were placed at Mr. Kossuth’s disposal. There would appear 
nothing strange in this stipulation, since, to organize militarily the 
Hungarian emigration, money was wanted, and why should Mr. 
Kossuth not receive subsidies from his new ally, the same as all the 
despotic powers of Europe had received subsidies from England 
during the whole course of the Anti-Jacobin war? However, I 
cannot suppress the fact that, of the millions thus put at his 
disposal, Mr. Kossuth at once appropriated for his own personal 
expenses the rather handsome figure of 75,000 francs, stipulating, 
besides, in case the Italian war should end without leading to the 
invasion of Hungary, for one year’s pension for himself. Before he 
left the Tuileries, it was agreed that Mr. Kossuth was to counteract 
the suspected Austrian tendencies of the Derby Ministry, by 
opening a neutrality campaign in England. It is generally known 
how, on his return to perfidious Albion, the spontaneous support 
of the Whigs and the Manchester school*’* enabled him to 
successfully perform this preliminary part of his engagement. 
Since 1851, the greater part of the Hungarian exiles of any 
distinction and political standing had separated from Mr. Kossuth, 
but what with the vista of an invasion of Hungary by the aid of 
French troops; what with the logical horse-power of three millions 
of francs—the world, as the real Napoleon in one of his fits of 
cynicism said, being governed by “le petit ventre,”’* save some 
honorable exceptions the whole of the Hungarian emigration in 
Europe flocked to the Bonapartist banners hoisted by Louis 
Kossuth. That the transactions which he entered upon with them 
had some Decembrist smack of corruption cannot be denied, since, 
to bestow a greater lot of French money upon his new-fangled 

partisans, he promoted them to higher military grades: lieuten- 
ants, for instance, being advanced to the rank of majors. In the 
first instance, every one received his traveling expenses to 
Piedmont, then a rich uniform (the cost of a major’s costume 
amounted to £150), and six months’ pay in advance, with the 
promise of pay for one year’s service on the conclusion of peace. 
The so-called Commander-in-Chief received a salary of 10,000 fr., 
the Generals 6,000 fr. each, the .Brigadiers 5,000 fr., the 
Lieutenant-Colonels 4,000 fr., the Majors 3,000 fr., and so forth. 

The names of the more prominent individuals who associated 
themselves with Kossuth and pocketed Bonapartist money are the 
following: Generals Klapka, Perczel, Vetter, Czecz; the Colonels 
Szab6, Imre and Istvan; Kiss, Count S. Teleki, Count Bethlen, 
Mednyanszky, Ihasz, and some lieutenant-colonels and majors. 
Among the civilians I may mention Count L. Teleki, Puky, 
Pulszky, Iranyi, Ludvigh, Simonyi, Henszlmann, Veress, and 
others—in fact, all the Hungarian refugees residing in England 
and on the Continent, with the single exception of S. Vukovics (at 
London or Axminster), Ronay (at London, a Hungarian savant), 
and B. Szemere (at Paris, formerly President of the Hungarian 
Ministry). 

Now, it would be unjust to think that all these men acted from 
corrupt motives. The majority probably consist of simple dupes— 
patriotic soldiers who cannot be supposed to possess distinct 
political principles, or the acumen to look through diplomatic 
webs. Some, like Gen. Perczel, withdrew as soon as events had 
shed light upon the Bonapartist imposture. Louis Kossuth, 
however, who as late as January, 1859, by his articles in Mazzini’s 
Pensiero ed Azione, had shown himself a competent judge of 
Bonaparte’s schemes, can by no means be exculpated in the same 
way. 

Written on September 5, 1859 

Tribune, No. 5748, September 24, 1859; Daily Tribune