sovereignty he had no conception. His patriotism, like his ambition, was
provincial. Yet his perceptions as to eternal necessity in all healthy
governments taught him that comprehensible relations between the state
and the population were needful to the very existence of a free
commonwealth. The United Provinces, he maintained, were not a republic,
but a league of seven provinces very loosely hung together, a mere
provisional organization for which it was not then possible to substitute
anything better. He expressed this opinion with deep regret, just as the
war of independence was closing, and added his conviction that, without
some well-ordered government, no republic could stand.

Yet, as time wore on, the Advocate was destined to acquiesce more and
more in this defective constitution. A settled theory there was none,
and it would have been difficult legally and historically to establish
the central sovereignty of the States-General as matter of right.

Thus Barneveld, who was anything but a democrat, became, almost
unwittingly, the champion of the least venerable or imposing of all
forms of aristocracy--an oligarchy of traders who imagined themselves
patricians. Corporate rights, not popular liberty, seemed, in his view,
the precious gains made by such a prodigious expenditure of time, money,
and blood. Although such acquisitions were practically a vast addition
to the stock of human freedom then existing in the world, yet torrents of
blood and millions of treasure were to be wasted in the coming centuries
before mankind was to convince itself that a republic is only to be made
powerful and perpetual by placing itself upon the basis of popular right
rather than on that of municipal privilege.

The singular docility of the Dutch people, combined with the simplicity,
honesty, and practical sagacity of the earlier burgher patricians, made