In truth, Kossuth was facing a bit of a dilemma. He was no longer the obscure lawyer who, in actual history, had possessed little more than a name.
In fact, after Count Széchenyi, backed by Franz, had engaged him in a series of debates, the count had been utterly trounced.
His cautious reform theories had been treated like toilet paper, and he had picked the wrong side. According to Széchenyi's theory, abolishing serfdom and granting the peasants their existing plots of land would offend the great nobles.
This would break up the great estates into countless scattered plots. It might be a good thing for the peasants, and it would prevent the great nobles from rigging the distribution of the land.
But the costs of running the great nobles' farms would skyrocket. And who would pay for the land freed from serfdom? Széchenyi wanted the state, the serfs, and the landlords to share the burden. That was unacceptable to the landed nobility.
In practice, this meant the nobles would have to give up their feudal powers, wreck their existing farms, and then pay a sum on top of it all.
Széchenyi also wanted to abolish guilds and price controls. France had done away with its guild system in the previous century, while Britain had consigned 99 percent of its guilds to the dustbin of history as early as the sixteenth century.
Only the booksellers' guild had managed to cling to life, and then only because the British Government needed it to control public opinion. But by the end of the eighteenth century, even it was in decline.
But this was Hungary, not France or Britain. The guilds were the very people who would have to drive the development of a capitalist economy. They would never willingly surrender the power they