but a satisfactory state at that period. There was certainly vast room
for improvement. Nevertheless he was wrong in his views of the leading
tendencies of his age. Holland and England, self-helping, self-moving,
were already inaugurating a new era in the history of the world. The
spirit of commercial maritime enterprise--then expanding rapidly into
large proportions--was to be matched against the religious and knightly
enthusiasm which had accomplished such wonders in an age that was passing
away. Spain still personified, and had ever personified, chivalry,
loyalty, piety; but its chivalry, loyalty, and piety, were now in a
corrupted condition. The form was hollow, and the sacred spark had fled.
In Holland and England intelligent enterprise had not yet degenerated
into mere greed for material prosperity. The love of danger, the thirst
for adventure, the thrilling sense of personal responsibility and human
dignity--not the base love for land and lucre--were the governing
sentiments which led those bold Dutch and English rovers to
circumnavigate the world in cockle-shells, and to beard the most potent
monarch on the earth, both at home and abroad, with a handful of
volunteers.

This then was the contest, and this the machinery by which it was to be
maintained. A struggle for national independence, liberty of conscience,
freedom of the seas, against sacerdotal and world-absorbing tyranny;
a mortal combat of the splendid infantry of Spain and Italy, the
professional reiters of Germany, the floating castles of a world-empire,
with the militiamen and mercantile-marine of England and Holland united.
Holland had been engaged twenty years long in the conflict. England had
thus far escaped it; but there was no doubt, and could be none, that her
time had come. She must fight the battle of Protestantism on sea and
shore, shoulder to shoulder, with the Netherlanders, or await the
conqueror's foot on her own soil.