dominions all artisans, navigators, and traders. Despising all other
nations and giving them the law, they had ruined the obedient provinces.
Ostend, Nieuwpoort, Dunkerk were wasting away, and ought to be restored.

"I have profoundly studied forty years long the subjects of commerce and
navigation," said the practical person, "and I have succeeded in
penetrating the secrets and acquiring, as it were, universal knowledge--
let me not be suspected of boasting--of the whole discovered world and of
the ocean. I have been assisted by study of the best works of geography
and history, by my own labours, and by those of my late father, a man of
illustrious genius and heroical conceptions and very zealous in the
Catholic faith."

The modest and practical son of an illustrious but anonymous father, then
coming to the point, said it would be the easiest thing in the world to
direct the course of the Scheldt into an entirely new channel through
Spanish Flanders to the sea. Thus the Dutch ports and forts which had
been constructed with such magnificence and at such vast expense would be
left high and dry; the Spaniards would build new ones in Flanders, and
thus control the whole navigation and deprive the Hollanders of that
empire of the sea which they now so proudly arrogated. This scheme was
much simpler to carry out than the vulgar might suppose, and, when.
accomplished, it would destroy the commerce, navigation, and fisheries of
the Hollanders, throwing it all into the hands of the Archdukes. This
would cause such ruin, poverty, and tumults everywhere that all would be
changed. The Republic of the United States would annihilate itself and
fall to pieces; the religious dissensions, the war of one sect with
another, and the jealousy of the House of Nassau, suspected of plans
hostile to popular liberties, finishing the work of destruction. "Then
the Republic," said the man of universal science, warming at sight of the