of the Republic--Influence of Geographical position on the fate of
the Netherlands--Contrast offered by America--Miserable state of the
so--called "obedient" provinces--Prosperity of the Commonwealth--Its
internal government--Tendency to provincialism--Quibbles of the
English Members of the Council, Wilkes and Bodley--Exclusion of
Olden-Barneveld from the State Council--Proposals of Philip for
mediation with the United Provinces--The Provinces resolutely
decline all proffers of intervention.

The United Provinces had now been engaged in unbroken civil war for a
quarter of a century. It is, however, inaccurate to designate this great
struggle with tyranny as a civil war. It was a war for independence,
maintained by almost the whole population of the United Provinces against
a foreigner, a despot, alien to their blood, ignorant of their language,
a hater of their race, a scorner of their religion, a trampler upon their
liberties, their laws, and institutions--a man who had publicly declared
that he would rather the whole nation were exterminated than permitted to
escape from subjection to the Church of Rome. Liberty of speech, liberty
of the press, liberty of thought on political, religious, and social
questions existed within those Dutch pastures and Frisian swamps to a far
greater degree than in any other part of the world at that day; than in
very many regions of Christendom in our own time. Personal slavery was
unknown. In a large portion of their territory it had never existed.
The free Frisians, nearest blood-relations of, in this respect, the less
favoured Anglo-Saxons, had never bowed the knee to the feudal system, nor
worn nor caused to be worn the collar of the serf. In the battles for
human liberty no nation has stood with cleaner hands before the great
tribunal, nor offered more spotless examples of patriotism to be emulated
in all succeeding ages, than the Netherlanders in their gigantic struggle
with Philip of Spain. It was not a class struggling for their own