...  To the Dutch Republic, even more than to Florence at an earlier day is the world indebted for practical instruction in that great science of political equilibrium which must always become more and more important as the various states of the civilized world are pressed more closely together, and as the struggle for pre-eminence becomes more feverish and fatal.  Courage and skill in political and military combinations enabled William the Silent to overcome the most powerful and unscrupulous monarch of his age.  The same hereditary audacity and fertility of genius placed the destiny of Europe in the hands of William’s great-grandson, and enabled him to mould into an impregnable barrier the various elements of opposition to the overshadowing monarchy of Louis XIV.  As the schemes of the Inquisition and the unparalleled tyranny of Philip, in one century led to the establishment of the Republic of the United Provinces, so, in the next, the revocation of the Nantes Edict and the invasion of Holland are avenged by the elevation of the Dutch Stadholder upon the throne of the stipendiary Stuarts.

To all who speak the English language, the history of the great agony through which the republic of Holland was ushered into life must have peculiar interest, for it is a portion of the records of the Anglo-Saxon race—­essentially the same whether in Friesland, England, or Massachusetts.

...  The great Western Republic, therefore—­in whose ... veins flows much of that ancient and kindred blood received from the nation once ruling a noble portion of its territory, and tracking its own political existence to the same parent spring of temperate human liberty—­must look with affectionate interest upon the trials of the elder commonwealth.

...  The lessons of history and the fate of free states can never be sufficiently pondered by those upon whom so large and heavy a responsibility for the maintenance of rational human freedom rests.

* * * * *

=_Alexander B. Meek,[42] 1814-1865._= (Manual, p. 523.)

From “Romantic Passages in Southwestern History.”

=_142._= EXILED FRENCH OFFICERS IN ALABAMA.

Upon the colony they bestowed the name of Marengo, which is still preserved in the county.  Other relics of their nomenclature, drawn similarly from battles in which some of them had been distinguished, are to be found in the villages of Linden and Arcola....

Who that would have looked upon Marshal Grouchy or General Lefebvre, as, dressed in their plain, rustic habiliments,—­the straw hat, the homespun coat, the brogan shoes,—­they drove the plough in the open field, or wielded the axe in the new-ground clearing, would, if unacquainted with their history, have dreamed that those farmer-looking men had sat in the councils of monarchs, and had headed mighty armies in the fields of the sternest strife the world has ever seen?  “Do you know, sir,”