created the Puritans and Huguenots. The central idea of Calvinism is the
right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience,
enlightened by the Bible. Rousseau was no Calvinist, but the principles
of religious and civil liberty are so closely connected that he may have
caught their spirit at Geneva, in spite of his hideous immorality and
his cynical unbelief. Yet even Calvin's magnificent career in defence of
the right of conscience to rebel against authority, which laid the solid
foundation of theology and church discipline on which Protestantism was
built up, arrived at such a pitch of arbitrary autocracy as to show
that, if liberty be "human" and "native," authority is no less so.

Whether, then, liberty is a privilege granted to a few, or a right to
which all people are justly entitled, it is bootless to discuss; but its
development among civilized nations is a worthy object of
historical inquiry.

A late writer, Douglas Campbell, with some plausibility and considerable
learning, traces to the Dutch republic most that is valuable in American
institutions, such as town-meetings, representative government,
restriction of taxation by the people, free schools, toleration of
religious worship, and equal laws. No doubt the influence of Holland in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in stimulating free inquiry,
religious toleration, and self-government, as well as learning,
commerce, manufactures, and the arts, was considerable, not only on the
Puritan settlers of New England, but perhaps on England itself. No
doubt the English Puritans who fled to Holland during the persecutions
of Archbishop Laud learned much from a people whose religious oracle was
Calvin, and whose great hero was William the Silent. Mr. Motley, in the
most brilliant and perhaps the most learned history ever written by an
American, has made a revelation of a nation heretofore supposed to be