The people were numerous, industrious, accustomed for centuries to a state of comparative civil freedom, and to a lively foreign trade, by which their minds were saved from the stagnation of bigotry.  It was natural that they should begin to generalize, and to pass from the concrete images presented them in the Flemish monasteries to the abstract character of Rome itself.  The Flemish, above all their other qualities, were a commercial nation.  Commerce was the mother of their freedom, so far as they had acquired it, in civil matters.  It was struggling to give birth to a larger liberty, to freedom of conscience.  The provinces were situated in the very heart of Europe.  The blood of a world-wide traffic was daily coursing through the thousand arteries of that water-in-woven territory.  There was a mutual exchange between the Netherlands and all the world; and ideas were as liberally interchanged as goods.  Truth was imported as freely as less precious merchandise.  The psalms of Marot were as current as the drugs of Molucca or the diamonds of Borneo.  The prohibitory measures of a despotic government could not annihilate this intellectual trade, nor could bigotry devise an effective quarantine to exclude the religious pest which lurked in every bale of merchandise, and was wafted on every breeze from East and West.

The edicts of the Emperor had been endured, but not accepted.  The horrible persecution under which so many thousands had sunk had produced its inevitable result.  Fertilized by all this innocent blood, the soil of the Netherlands became as a watered garden, in which liberty, civil and religious, was to flourish perennially.  The scaffold had its daily victims, but did not make a single convert.  The statistics of these crimes will perhaps never be accurately adjusted, nor will it be ascertained whether the famous estimate of Grotius was an exaggerated or an inadequate calculation.  Those who love horrible details may find ample material.  The chronicles contain the lists of these obscure martyrs; but their names, hardly pronounced in their life-time, sound barbarously in our ears, and will never ring through the trumpet of fame.  Yet they were men who dared and suffered as much as men can dare and suffer in this world, and for the noblest cause which can inspire humanity.  Fanatics they certainly were not, if fanaticism consists in show, without corresponding substance.  For them all was terrible reality.  The Emperor and his edicts were realities, the axe, the stake were realities, and the heroism with which men took each other by the hand and walked into the flames, or with which women sang a song of triumph while the grave-digger was shovelling the earth upon their living faces, was a reality also.