dull, money-loving, and uninteresting. Too high praise cannot be given
to those brave and industrious people who redeemed their morasses from
the sea, who grew rich and powerful without the natural advantages of
soil and climate, who fought for eighty years against the whole power of
Spain, who nobly secured their independence against overwhelming forces,
who increased steadily in population and wealth when obliged to open
their dikes upon their cultivated fields, who established universities
and institutions of learning when almost driven to despair, and who
became the richest people in Europe, whitening the ocean with their
ships, establishing banks and colonies, creating a new style of
painting, and teaching immortal lessons in government when they occupied
a country but little larger than Wales. Civilization is as proud of such
a country as Holland as of Greece itself.

With all this, I still believe that it is to England we must go for the
origin of what we are most proud of in our institutions, much as the
Dutch have taught us for which we ought to be grateful, and much as we
may owe to French sceptics and Swiss religionists. This belief is
confirmed by a book I have just read by Hannis Taylor on the "Origin and
Growth of the English Constitution." It is not an artistic history, by
any means, but one in which the author has brought out the recent
investigations of Edward Freeman, John Richard Green, Bishop Stubbs,
Professor Gneist of Berlin, and others, who with consummate learning
have gone to the roots of things,--some of whom, indeed, are dry
writers, regardless of style, disdainful of any thing but facts, which
they have treated with true scholastic minuteness. It appears from these
historians, as quoted by Taylor, and from other authorities to which the
earlier writers on English history had no access, that the germs of our
free institutions existed among the Anglo-Saxons, and were developed to
a considerable extent among their Norman conquerors in the thirteenth