were the Earls of Flanders; for the bold foresters of Charles the Great
had soon wrested the sovereignty of their little territory from his
feeble descendants as easily as Baldwin, with the iron arm, had deprived
the bald Charles of his daughter. Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overyssel,
Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland (all seven being portions of Friesland
in a general sense), were crowded together upon a little desolate corner
of Europe; an obscure fragment of Charlemagne's broken empire. They were
afterwards to constitute the United States of the Netherlands, one of the
most powerful republics of history. Meantime, for century after century,
the Counts of Holland and the Bishops of Utrecht were to exercise divided
sway over the territory.

Thus the whole country was broken into many shreds and patches of
sovereignty. The separate history of such half-organized morsels is
tedious and petty. Trifling dynasties, where a family or two were every
thing, the people nothing, leave little worth recording. Even the most
devout of genealogists might shudder to chronicle the long succession of
so many illustrious obscure.

A glance, however, at the general features of the governmental system now
established in the Netherlands, at this important epoch in the world's
history, will show the transformations which the country, in common with
other portions of the western world, had undergone.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded
away. An entirely new polity has succeeded. No great popular assembly
asserts its sovereignty, as in the ancient German epoch; no generals and
temporary kings are chosen by the nation. The elective power had been
lost under the Romans, who, after conquest, had conferred the
administrative authority over their subject provinces upon officials