natural that they should begin to generalize, and to pass from the
concrete images presented them in the Flemish monasteries to the abstract
character of Rome itself. The Flemish, above all their other qualities,
were a commercial nation. Commerce was the mother of their freedom, so
far as they had acquired it, in civil matters. It was struggling to give
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