The contest to which the Advocate was called had become mainly a personal
and a political one, although the weapons with which it was fought were
taken from ecclesiastical arsenals. It was now an unequal contest.

For the great captain of the country and of his time, the son of William
the Silent, the martial stadholder, in the fulness of his fame and vigour
of his years, had now openly taken his place as the chieftain of the
Contra-Remonstrants. The conflict between the civil and the military
element for supremacy in a free commonwealth has never been more vividly
typified than in this death-grapple between Maurice and Barneveld.

The aged but still vigorous statesman, ripe with half a century of
political lore, and the high-born, brilliant, and scientific soldier,
with the laurels of Turnhout and Nieuwpoort and of a hundred famous
sieges upon his helmet, reformer of military science, and no mean
proficient in the art of politics and government, were the
representatives and leaders of the two great parties into which the
Commonwealth had now unhappily divided itself. But all history shows
that the brilliant soldier of a republic is apt to have the advantage,
in a struggle for popular affection and popular applause, over the
statesman, however consummate. The general imagination is more excited
by the triumphs of the field than by those of the tribune, and the man
who has passed many years of life in commanding multitudes with
necessarily despotic sway is often supposed to have gained in the process
the attributes likely to render him most valuable as chief citizen of a
flee commonwealth. Yet national enthusiasm is so universally excited by
splendid military service as to forbid a doubt that the sentiment is
rooted deeply in our nature, while both in antiquity and in modern times
there are noble although rare examples of the successful soldier
converting himself into a valuable and exemplary magistrate.