authority.  Whatever the nominal sovereignty over them, this most republican tribe of Netherlanders, or of Europeans, had never accepted feudalism.  There was an annual congress of the whole confederacy.  Each of the seven little states, on the other hand, regulated its own internal affairs.  Each state was subdivided into districts, each district governed by a Griet-mann (greatman, selectman) and assistants.  Above all these district officers was a Podesta, a magistrate identical, in name and functions, with the chief officer of the Italian republics.  There was sometimes but one Podesta; sometimes one for each province.  He was chosen by the people, took oath of fidelity to the separate estates, or, if Podesta-general, to the federal diet, and was generally elected for a limited term, although sometimes for life.  He was assisted by a board of eighteen or twenty councillors.  The deputies to the general congress were chosen by popular suffrage in Easter-week.  The clergy were not recognized as a political estate.

Thus, in those lands which a niggard nature had apparently condemned to perpetual poverty and obscurity, the principle of reasonable human freedom, without which there is no national prosperity or glory worth contending for, was taking deepest and strongest root.  Already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Friesland was a republic, except in name; Holland, Flanders, Brabant, had acquired a large share of self-government.  The powerful commonwealth, at a later period to be evolved out of the great combat between centralized tyranny and the spirit of civil and religious liberty, was already foreshadowed.  The elements, of which that important republic was to be compounded, were germinating for centuries.  Love of freedom, readiness to strike and bleed at any moment in her cause, manly resistance to despotism, however overshadowing, were the leading characteristics of the race in all regions or periods, whether among Frisian swamps, Dutch dykes, the gentle hills and dales of England, or the pathless forests of America.  Doubtless, the history of human liberty in Holland and Flanders, as every where else upon earth where there has been such a history, unrolls many scenes of turbulence and bloodshed; although these features have been exaggerated by prejudiced historians.  Still, if there were luxury and insolence, sedition and uproar, at any rate there was life.  Those violent little commonwealths had blood in their veins.  They were compact of proud, self-helping, muscular vigor.  The most sanguinary tumults which they ever enacted in the face of day, were better than the order and silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism.  That very unruliness was educating the people for their future work.  Those merchants, manufacturers, country squires, and hard-fighting barons, all pent up in a narrow corner of the earth, quarrelling with each other and with all the world for centuries, were keeping alive a national pugnacity of character, for which there was to be a heavy demand in the sixteenth century, and without which the fatherland had perhaps succumbed in the most unequal conflict ever waged by man against oppression.