remains undisputed as ever. Neither the nation,
in mass, nor the citizens, in class, lay claim to
human rights. All upper attributes—legislative,
judicial, administrative—remain in the
land-master’s breast alone. It is an absurdity,
therefore, to argue with Grotius concerning the unknown
antiquity of the Batavian republic. The republic
never existed at all till the sixteenth century, and
was only born after long years of agony. The
democratic instincts of the ancient German savages
were to survive in the breasts of their cultivated
descendants, but an organized, civilized, republican
polity had never existed. The cities, as they
grew in strength, never claimed the right to make
the laws or to share in the government. As a matter
of fact, they did make the laws, and shared, beside,
in most important functions of sovereignty, in the
treaty-making power, especially. Sometimes by
bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises,
or good hard blows they extorted their charters.
Their codes, statutes, joyful entrances, and other
constitutions were dictated by the burghers and sworn
to by the monarch. They were concessions from
above; privileges private laws; fragments indeed of
a larger liberty, but vastly, better than the slavery
for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead
of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and
violent days, would have yielded little nutriment;
but they still rather sought to reconcile themselves,
by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which
they had invaded, than to overturn the system.
Thus the cities, not regarding themselves as representatives
or aggregations of the people, became fabulous personages,
bodies without souls, corporations which had acquired
vitality and strength enough to assert their existence.
As persons, therefore—gigantic individualities—they
wheeled into the feudal ranks and assumed feudal powers
and responsibilities. The city of Dort; of Middelburg,
of Ghent, of Louvain, was a living being, doing fealty,
claiming service, bowing to its lord, struggling with
its equals, trampling upon its slaves.
Thus, in these obscure provinces, as throughout Europe,
in a thousand remote and isolated corners, civilization
builds itself up, synthetically and slowly; yet at
last, a whole is likely to get itself constructed.
Thus, impelled by great and conflicting forces, now
obliquely, now backward, now upward, yet, upon the
whole, onward, the new Society moves along its predestined
orbit, gathering consistency and strength as it goes.
Society, civilization, perhaps, but hardly humanity.
The people has hardly begun to extricate itself from
the clods in which it lies buried. There are
only nobles, priests, and, latterly, cities. In
the northern Netherlands, the degraded condition of
the mass continued longest. Even in Friesland,
liberty, the dearest blessing of the ancient Frisians,
had been forfeited in a variety of ways. Slavery
was both voluntary and compulsory. Paupers sold