protest as oldest member present, while Grotius as the youngest had acted
as scribe. He would have supported the Synod if legally voted, but would
have preferred the convocation, under the authority of all the provinces,
of a general, not a national, synod, in which, besides clergy and laymen
from the Netherlands, deputations from all Protestant states and churches
should take part; a kind of Protestant oecumenical council.

As to the enlistment, by the States of a province, of soldiers to keep
the peace and suppress tumults in its cities during times of political
and religious excitement, it was the most ordinary of occurrences. In
his experience of more than forty years he had never heard the right even
questioned. It was pure ignorance of law and history to find it a
novelty.

To hire temporarily a sufficient number of professional soldiers, he
considered a more wholesome means of keeping the peace than to enlist one
portion of the citizens of a town against another portion, when party and
religious spirit was running high. His experience had taught him that
the mutual hatred of the inhabitants, thus inflamed, became more lasting
and mischievous than the resentment caused through suppression of
disorder by an armed and paid police of strangers.

It was not only the right but the most solemn duty of the civil authority
to preserve the tranquillity, property, and lives of citizens committed
to their care. "I have said these fifty years," said Barneveld, "that it
is better to be governed by magistrates than mobs. I have always
maintained and still maintain that the most disastrous, shameful, and
ruinous condition into which this land can fall is that in which the
magistrates are overcome by the rabble of the towns and receive laws
from them. Nothing but perdition can follow from that."