oaths and other political complications, by which he had entangled
himself during his cautious advance to power. He was now untrammelled
again. As the conscience of the smooth usurper was, thenceforth, the
measure of provincial liberty, his subjects soon found it meted to them
more sparingly than they wished. From this point, then, through the
Burgundian period, and until the rise of the republic, the liberty of the
Netherlands, notwithstanding several brilliant but brief laminations,
occurring at irregular intervals, seemed to remain in almost perpetual
eclipse.

The material prosperity of the country had, however, vastly increased.
The fisheries of Holland had become of enormous importance. The
invention of the humble Beukelzoon of Biervliet, had expanded into a mine
of wealth. The fisheries, too, were most useful as a nursery of seamen,
and were already indicating Holland's future naval supremacy. The
fishermen were the militia of the ocean, their prowess attested in the
war with the Hanseatic cities, which the provinces of Holland and Zeland,
in Philip's name, but by their own unassisted exertions, carried on
triumphantly at this epoch. Then came into existence that race of cool
and daring mariners, who, in after times, were to make the Dutch name
illustrious throughout the world, the men, whose fierce descendants, the
"beggars of the sea," were to make the Spanish empire tremble, the men,
whose later successors swept the seas with brooms at the mast-head, and
whose ocean-battles with their equally fearless English brethren often
lasted four uninterrupted days and nights.

The main strength of Holland was derived from the ocean, from whose
destructive grasp she had wrested herself, but in whose friendly embrace
she remained. She was already placing securely the foundations of
commercial wealth and civil liberty upon those shifting quicksands which