in money, plate, furniture, and endorsements of various kinds, for which a partial reimbursement was almost indispensable to save him from serious difficulties.  The Prince, however, unable to procure him any assistance, had been obliged him once more to entreat him to display the generosity and the self-denial which the country had never found wanting at his hands or at those of his kindred.  The appeal had not been, in vain, but the Count was obviously not in a condition to effect anything more at that moment to relieve the financial distress of the states.  The exchequer was crippled.

[The contributions of Holland and Zealand for war expenses amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand florins monthly.  The pay of a captain was eighty florins monthly; that of a lieutenant, forty; that of a corporal, fifteen; that of a drummer, fifer, or Minister, twelve; that of a common soldier, seven and a half.  A captain had also one hundred and fifty florins each month to distribute among the most meritorious of his company.  Each soldier was likewise furnished with food; bedding, fire, light, and washing.—­Renom de France Ms, vol. ii. c. 46,]

Holland and Zealand were cut in twain by the occupation of Schouwen and the approaching fall of its capital.  Germany, England, France; all refused to stretch out their hands to save the heroic but exhaustless little provinces.  It was at this moment that a desperate but sublime resolution took possession of the Prince’s mind.  There seemed but one way left to exclude the Spaniards for ever from Holland and Zealand, and to rescue the inhabitants from impending ruin.  The Prince had long brooded over the scheme, and the hour seemed to have struck for its fulfilment.  His project was to collect all the vessels, of every description, which could be obtained throughout the Netherlands.  The whole population of the two provinces, men, women, and children, together with all the moveable property of the country, were then to be embarked on board this numerous fleet, and to seek a new home beyond the seas.  The windmills were then to be burned, the dykes pierced, the sluices opened in every direction, and the country restored for ever to the ocean, from which it had sprung.

It is difficult to say whether the resolution, if Providence had permitted its fulfilment, would have been, on the whole, better or worse for humanity and civilization.  The ships which would have borne the heroic Prince and his fortunes might have taken the direction of the newly-discovered Western hemisphere.  A religious colony, planted by a commercial and liberty-loving race, in a virgin soil, and directed by patrician but self-denying hands, might have preceded, by half a century, the colony which a kindred race, impelled by similar motives, and under somewhat similar circumstances and conditions, was destined to plant upon the stern shores of New England.  Had they directed their course to the warm and fragrant islands of the East, an independent Christian commonwealth might have arisen among those prolific regions, superior in importance to any subsequent colony of Holland, cramped from its birth by absolute subjection to a far distant metropolis.