A glance, however, at the general features of the governmental system now established in the Netherlands, at this important epoch in the world’s history, will show the transformations which the country, in common with other portions of the western world, had undergone.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.  An entirely new polity has succeeded.  No great popular assembly asserts its sovereignty, as in the ancient German epoch; no generals and temporary kings are chosen by the nation.  The elective power had been lost under the Romans, who, after conquest, had conferred the administrative authority over their subject provinces upon officials appointed by the metropolis.  The Franks pursued the same course.  In Charlemagne’s time, the revolution is complete.  Popular assemblies and popular election entirely vanish.  Military, civil, and judicial officers-dukes, earls, margraves, and others—­are all king’s creatures, ‘knegton des konings, pueri regis’, and so remain, till they abjure the creative power, and set up their own.  The principle of Charlemagne, that his officers should govern according to local custom, helps them to achieve their own independence, while it preserves all that is left of national liberty and law.

The counts, assisted by inferior judges, hold diets from time to time—­thrice, perhaps, annually.  They also summon assemblies in case of war.  Thither are called the great vassals, who, in turn, call their lesser vassals; each armed with “a shield, a spear, a bow, twelve arrows, and a cuirass.”  Such assemblies, convoked in the name of a distant sovereign, whose face his subjects had never seen, whose language they could hardly understand, were very different from those tumultuous mass-meetings, where boisterous freemen, armed with the weapons they loved the best, and arriving sooner or later, according to their pleasure, had been accustomed to elect their generals and magistrates and to raise them upon their shields.  The people are now governed, their rulers appointed by an invisible hand.  Edicts, issued by a power, as it were, supernatural, demand implicit obedience.  The people, acquiescing in their own annihilation, abdicate not only their political but their personal rights.  On the other hand, the great source of power diffuses less and less of light and warmth.  Losing its attractive and controlling influence, it becomes gradually eclipsed, while its satellites fly from their prescribed bounds and chaos and darkness return.  The sceptre, stretched over realms so wide, requires stronger hands than those of degenerate Carlovingians.  It breaks asunder.  Functionaries become sovereigns, with hereditary, not delegated, right to own the people, to tax their roads and rivers, to take tithings of their blood and sweat, to harass them in all the relations of life.  There is no longer a metropolis to protect them from official oppression.  Power, the more sub-divided,