birth to a larger liberty, to freedom of conscience. The provinces were
situated in the very heart of Europe. The blood of a world-wide traffic
was daily coursing through the thousand arteries of that water-in-woven
territory. There was a mutual exchange between the Netherlands and all
the world; and ideas were as liberally interchanged as goods. Truth was
imported as freely as less precious merchandise. The psalms of Marot
were as current as the drugs of Molucca or the diamonds of Borneo. The
prohibitory measures of a despotic government could not annihilate this
intellectual trade, nor could bigotry devise an effective quarantine to
exclude the religious pest which lurked in every bale of merchandise, and
was wafted on every breeze from East and West.

The edicts of the Emperor had been endured, but not accepted. The
horrible persecution under which so many thousands had sunk had produced
its inevitable result. Fertilized by all this innocent blood, the soil
of the Netherlands became as a watered garden, in which liberty, civil
and religious, was to flourish perennially. The scaffold had its daily
victims, but did not make a single convert. The statistics of these
crimes will perhaps never be accurately adjusted, nor will it be
ascertained whether the famous estimate of Grotius was an exaggerated or
an inadequate calculation. Those who love horrible details may find
ample material. The chronicles contain the lists of these obscure
martyrs; but their names, hardly pronounced in their life-time, sound
barbarously in our ears, and will never ring through the trumpet of fame.
Yet they were men who dared and suffered as much as men can dare and
suffer in this world, and for the noblest cause which can inspire
humanity. Fanatics they certainly were not, if fanaticism consists in
show, without corresponding substance. For them all was terrible
reality. The Emperor and his edicts were realities, the axe, the stake
were realities, and the heroism with which men took each other by the