cities had full right to provide for it by arming a portion of their own
inhabitants or by enlisting paid troops. The sovereign counts of Holland
and bishops of Utrecht certainly possessed and exercised that right for
many hundred years, and by necessary tradition it passed to the states
succeeding to their ancient sovereignty. He then gave from the stores of
his memory innumerable instances in which soldiers had been enlisted by
provinces and cities all over the Netherlands from the time of the
abjuration of Spain down to that moment. Through the whole period of
independence in the time of Anjou, Matthias, Leicester, as well as under
the actual government, it had been the invariable custom thus to provide
both by land and sea and on the rivers against robbers, rebels, pirates,
mischief-makers, assailing thieves, domestic or foreign. It had been
done by the immortal William the Silent on many memorable occasions, and
in fact the custom was so notorious that soldiers so enlisted were known
by different and peculiar nicknames in the different provinces and towns.

That the central government had no right to meddle with religious
matters was almost too self-evident an axiom to prove. Indeed the
chief difficulty under which the Advocate laboured throughout this whole
process was the monstrous assumption by his judges of a political and
judicial system which never had any existence even in imagination. The
profound secrecy which enwrapped the proceedings from that day almost to
our own and an ignorant acquiescence of a considerable portion of the
public in accomplished facts offer the only explanation of a mystery
which must ever excite our wonder. If there were any impeachment at all,
it was an impeachment of the form of government itself. If language
could mean anything whatever, a mere perusal of the Articles of Union
proved that the prisoner had never violated that fundamental pact. How
could the general government prescribe an especial formulary for the
Reformed Church, and declare opposition to its decrees treasonable, when