course would have defeated its own ends.  The murderous and mischievous pranks of Imbize, Ryhove, and such demagogues, at Ghent and elsewhere, with their wild theories of what they called Grecian, Roman, and Helvetian republicanism, had inflicted damage enough on the cause of freedom, and had paved the road for the return of royal despotism.  The senators assembled at the Hague gave more moderate instructions to their delegates at Augsburg.  They were to place the King’s tenure upon contract—­not an implied one, but a contract as literal as the lease of a farm.  The house of Austria, they were to maintain, had come into the possession of the seventeen Netherlands upon certain express conditions, and with the understanding that its possession was to cease with the first condition broken.  It was a question of law and fact, not of royal or popular right.  They were to take the ground, not only that the contract had been violated, but that the foundation of perpetual justice upon which it rested; had likewise been undermined.  It was time to vindicate both written charters and general principles.  “God has given absolute power to no mortal man,” said Saint Aldegonde, “to do his own will against all laws and all reason.”  “The contracts which the King has broken are no pedantic fantasies,” said the estates, “but laws planted by nature in the universal heart of mankind, and expressly acquiesced in by prince and people.”  All men, at least, who speak the English tongue, will accept the conclusion of the provinces, that when laws which protected the citizen against arbitrary imprisonment and guaranteed him a trial in his own province—­which forbade the appointment of foreigners to high office —­which secured the property of the citizen from taxation, except by the representative body—­which forbade intermeddling on the part of the sovereign with the conscience of the subject in religious matters—­when such laws had been subverted by blood tribunals, where drowsy judges sentenced thousands to stake and scaffold without a hearing by excommunication, confiscation, banishment-by hanging, beheading, burning, to such enormous extent and with such terrible monotony that the executioner’s sword came to be looked upon as the only symbol of justice —­then surely it might be said, without exaggeration, that the complaints of the Netherlanders were “no pedantic fantasies,” and that the King had ceased to perform his functions as dispenser of God’s justice.

The Netherlanders dealt with facts.  They possessed a body of laws, monuments of their national progress, by which as good a share of individual liberty was secured to the citizen as was then enjoyed in any country of the world.  Their institutions admitted of great improvement, no doubt; but it was natural that a people so circumstanced should be unwilling to exchange their condition for the vassalage of “Moors or Indians.”