the world's memory; but would have sown with curses and misery the soil
of Europe for succeeding ages. The territory of the Netherlands is
narrow and meagre. It is but a slender kingdom now among the powers of
the earth. The political grandeur of nations is determined by physical
causes almost as much as by moral ones. Had the cataclysm which
separated the fortunate British islands from the mainland happened to
occur, instead, at a neighbouring point of the earth's crust; had the
Belgian, Dutch, German and Danish Netherland floated off as one island
into the sea, while that famous channel between two great rival nations
remained dry land, there would have been a different history of the
world.

But in the 16th century the history of one country was not an isolated
chapter of personages and events. The history of the Netherlands is
history of liberty. It was now combined with the English, now with
French, with German struggles for political and religious freedom, but it
is impossible to separate it from the one great complex which makes up
the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth
centuries.

At that day the Netherland republic was already becoming a power of
importance in the political family of Christendom. If, in spite of her
geographical disadvantages, she achieved so much, how much vaster might
her power have grown, how much stronger through her example might popular
institutions throughout the world have become, and how much more pacific
the relations of European tribes, had nature been less niggard in her
gifts to the young commonwealth. On the sea she was strong, for the
ocean is the best of frontiers; but on land her natural boundaries faded
vaguely away, without strong physical demarcations and with no sharply
defined limits of tongue, history or race. Accident or human caprice