The army establishment of the republic was fixed during the truce at
thirty thousand infantry and three thousand horse. This was a reduction
from the war footing of fifteen thousand men. Of the force retained,
four thousand were a French legion maintained by the king, two thousand
other French at the expense of the States, and distributed among other
troops, two thousand Scotch, three thousand English, three thousand
Germans. The rest were native Netherlanders, among whom, however, were
very few Hollanders and Zeelanders, from which races the navy, both
public and mercantile, was almost wholly supplied.

The revenue of the United Provinces was estimated at between seven and
eight millions of florins.

It is superfluous to call attention again to the wonderful smallness of
the means, the minuteness of the physical enginry, as compared with more
modern manifestations, especially in our own land and epoch, by which so
stupendous a result had been reached. In the midst of an age in which
regal and sacerdotal despotism had seemed as omnipotent and irreversible
as the elemental laws of the universe, the republic had been reproduced.
A commonwealth of sand-banks, lagoons, and meadows, less than fourteen
thousand square miles in extent, had done battle, for nearly half a
century, with the greatest of existing powers, a realm whose territory
was nearly a third of the globe, and which claimed universal monarchy.
And this had been done with an army averaging forty-six thousand men,
half of them foreigners hired by the job, and by a sea-faring population,
volunteering into ships of every class and denomination, from a fly-boat
to a galleot of war.

And when the republic had won its independence, after this almost eternal
warfare, it owed four or five millions of dollars, and had sometimes an