effective in the impending crisis.

It was most important, then, that these two nations should be united in
council, and should stand shoulder to shoulder as their great enemy
advanced. But this was precisely what had been rendered almost
impossible by the course of events during Leicester's year of
administration, and by his sudden but not final retirement at its close.
The two great national parties which had gradually been forming, had
remained in a fluid state during the presence of the governor-general.
During his absence they gradually hardened into the forms which they were
destined to retain for centuries. In the history of civil liberty, these
incessant contests, these oral and written disquisitions, these sharp
concussions of opinion, and the still harder blows, which, unfortunately,
were dealt on a few occasions by the combatants upon each other, make the
year 1587 a memorable one. The great questions of the origin of
government, the balance of dynastic forces, the distribution of powers,
were dealt with by the ablest heads, both Dutch and English, that could
be employed in the service of the kingdom and republic. It was a war of
protocols, arguments, orations, rejoinders, apostilles, and pamphlets;
very wholesome for the cause of free institutions and the intellectual
progress of mankind. The reader may perhaps be surprised to see with how
much vigour and boldness the grave questions which underlie all polity,
were handled so many years before the days of Russell and Sidney, of
Montesquieu and Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, and Voltaire; and
he may be even more astonished to find exceedingly democratic doctrines
propounded, if not believed in, by trained statesmen of the Elizabethan
school. He will be also apt to wonder that a more fitting time could not
be found for such philosophical debate than the epoch at which both the
kingdom and the republic were called upon to strain every sinew against
the most formidable and aggressive despotism that the world had known