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 throughout the
country may, however, be swiftly threaded. From the time of the first
Dirk to the close of the thirteenth century there were nearly four
hundred years of unbroken male descent, a long line of Dirks and