not merely a negative lack of homogeneity, but a positive incompatibility.  The Hollanders had for generations been fighters and men of enterprise; the Belgians had been the appanage of more powerful neighbors.  The Hollanders were Protestants; the Belgians were adherents of the Papacy.  The former were seafarers; the latter, farmers.  The sympathies or affiliations of the Dutch were with the English and the Germans; those of the Belgians were with the French.  Moreover, the Dutch were inclined to act oppressively toward the Belgians, and this disposition was made the more irksome by the fact that King William was a dull, stupid, narrow and very obstinate sovereign, who thought that to have a request made of him was reason sufficient for resisting it.

But over and above all these causes for disintegration of the new kingdom lay facts of the broadest significance and application.  The arbiters of 1815 did not sufficiently apprehend the meaning of the French Revolution.  The wars of Napoleon had made them forget it; his power had seemed so much more formidable and positive that the deeper forces which had brought about the events of the last decade of the eighteenth century were ignored.  But they still continued profoundly active, and were destined ere long to announce themselves anew.  They were in truth the generative forces of the nineteenth century.

They have not yet spent themselves; but as we look back upon the events of the past eighty or ninety years, we perceive what vast differences there are between what we were in Napoleon’s day and what we are now.  A long period of intrigue and misrule, of wars and revolutions, has been followed by material, mental and social changes affecting every class of the people, and especially that class which had hitherto been almost entirely unconsidered.  The wars of this century have been of another character than those of the past; they have not involved basic principles of human association, but have been the result of attempts to gain comparatively trifling political advantages, or else were the almost inevitable consequence of adjustments of national relations.  Several small new kingdoms have appeared; but their presence has not essentially altered the political aspect of Europe.  It is the conquests of mind that have been, in this century, far more important than the struggles of arms.  Steam, as applied to locomotion on sea and land, and to manufactures, has brought about modifications in social and industrial conditions that cannot be exaggerated.  Steamboats and railroads have not only given a different face to commerce and industry, but they have united the world in bonds of mutual knowledge and sympathy, which cannot fail to profoundly affect the political relations of mankind.  Isolation is ignorance; as soon as men begin to discover, by actual intercourse, the similarities and dissimilarities of their several conditions, these will begin to show improvements.  To be assured that people in one