Those great corporations the East and West India Companies were already
producing a new organism out of the political and commercial chaos which
had been so long brooding over civilization. Visions of an imperial zone
extending from the little Batavian island around the earth, a chain of
forts and factories dotting the newly-discovered and yet undiscovered
points of vantage, on island or promontory, in every sea; a watery,
nebulous, yet most substantial empire--not fantastic, but practical--not
picturesque and mediaeval, but modern and lucrative--a world-wide
commonwealth with a half-submerged metropolis, which should rule the
ocean with its own fleets and, like Venice and Florence, job its land
wars with mercenary armies--all these dreams were not the cloudy pageant
of a poet but the practical schemes of a great creative mind. They were
destined to become reality. Had the geographical conditions been
originally more favourable than they were, had Nature been less a
stepmother to the metropolis of the rising Batavian realm, the creation
might have been more durable. Barneveld, and the men who acted with him,
comprehended their age, and with slender materials were prepared to do
great things. They did not look very far perhaps into futurity, but they
saw the vast changes already taking place, and felt the throb of forces
actually at work.

The days were gone when the iron-clad man on horseback conquered a
kingdom with his single hand. Doubtless there is more of poetry and
romance in his deeds than in the achievements of the counting-house
aristocracy, the hierarchy of joint-stock corporations that was taking
the lead in the world's affairs. Enlarged views of the social compact
and of human liberty, as compared with those which later generations
ought to take, standing upon the graves, heaped up mountains high, of
their predecessors, could hardly be expected of them. But they knew how
to do the work before them. They had been able to smite a foreign and