for the large cities, with extensive districts and villages under their government, were rather petty states than municipalities.  Although the supreme legislative and executive functions belonged to the sovereign, yet each city made its by-laws, and possessed, beside, a body of statutes and regulations, made from time to time by its own authority and confirmed by the prince.  Thus a large portion, at least, of the nation shared practically in the legislative functions, which, technically, it did not claim; nor had the requirements of society made constant legislation so necessary, as that to exclude the people from the work was to enslave the country.  There was popular power enough to effect much good, but it was widely scattered, and, at the same time, confined in artificial forms.  The guilds were vassals of the towns, the towns, vassals of the feudal lord.  The guild voted in the “broad council” of the city as one person; the city voted in the estates as one person.  The people of the United Netherlands was the personage yet to be invented, It was a privilege, not a right, to exercise a handiwork, or to participate in the action of government.  Yet the mass of privileges was so large, the shareholders so numerous, that practically the towns were republics.  The government was in the hands of a large number of the people.  Industry and intelligence led to wealth and power.  This was great progress from the general servitude of the 11th and 12th centuries, an immense barrier against arbitrary rule.  Loftier ideas of human rights, larger conceptions of commerce, have taught mankind, in later days, the difference between liberties and liberty, between guilds and free competition.  At the same time it was the principle of mercantile association, in the middle ages, which protected the infant steps of human freedom and human industry against violence and wrong.  Moreover, at this period, the tree of municipal life was still green and vigorous.  The healthful flow of sap from the humblest roots to the most verdurous branches indicated the internal soundness of the core, and provided for the constant development of exterior strength.  The road to political influence was open to all, not by right of birth, but through honorable exertion of heads and hands.

The chief city of the Netherlands, the commercial capital of the world, was Antwerp.  In the North and East of Europe, the Hanseatic league had withered with the revolution in commerce.  At the South, the splendid marble channels, through which the overland India trade had been conducted from the Mediterranean by a few stately cities, were now dry, the great aqueducts ruinous and deserted.  Verona, Venice, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Bruges, were sinking, but Antwerp, with its deep and convenient river, stretched its arm to the ocean and caught the golden prize, as it fell from its sister cities’ grasp.  The city was so ancient that its genealogists, with ridiculous gravity, ascended to a period two centuries before