government. The powerful commonwealth, at a later period to be evolved
out of the great combat between centralized tyranny and the spirit of
civil and religious liberty, was already foreshadowed. The elements,
of which that important republic was to be compounded, were germinating
for centuries. Love of freedom, readiness to strike and bleed at any
moment in her cause, manly resistance to despotism, however
overshadowing, were the leading characteristics of the race in all
regions or periods, whether among Frisian swamps, Dutch dykes, the
gentle hills and dales of England, or the pathless forests of America.
Doubtless, the history of human liberty in Holland and Flanders, as every
where else upon earth where there has been such a history, unrolls many
scenes of turbulence and bloodshed; although these features have been
exaggerated by prejudiced historians. Still, if there were luxury and
insolence, sedition and uproar, at any rate there was life. Those
violent little commonwealths had blood in their veins. They were compact
of proud, self-helping, muscular vigor. The most sanguinary tumults
which they ever enacted in the face of day, were better than the order
and silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism. That very
unruliness was educating the people for their future work. Those
merchants, manufacturers, country squires, and hard-fighting barons, all
pent up in a narrow corner of the earth, quarrelling with each other and
with all the world for centuries, were keeping alive a national pugnacity
of character, for which there was to be a heavy demand in the sixteenth
century, and without which the fatherland had perhaps succumbed in the
most unequal conflict ever waged by man against oppression.

To sketch the special history of even the leading Netherland provinces,
during the five centuries which we have thus rapidly sought to
characterize, is foreign to our purpose. By holding the clue of
Holland's history, the general maze of dynastic transformations