In truth, neither Maurice nor Barneveld was likely to assist the French king in his intrigues against the independence of their fatherland.  Both had higher objects of ambition than to become the humble and well-paid servants of a foreign potentate.  The stadholder doubtless dreamed of a crown which might have been his father’s, and which his own illustrious services might be supposed to have earned for himself.  If that tempting prize were more likely to be gained by a continuance of the war, it is none the less certain that he considered peace, and still more truce, as fatal to the independence of the provinces.

The Advocate, on the other hand, loved his country well.  Perhaps he loved power even better.  To govern the city magistracies of Holland, through them the provincial estates; and through them again the States-General of the whole commonwealth; as first citizen of a republic to wield; the powers of a king; as statesman, diplomatist, and financier, to create a mighty empire out of those slender and but recently emancipated provinces of Spain, was a more flattering prospect for a man of large intellect, iron will, and infinite resources, than to sink into the contemptible position of stipendiary to a foreign master.  He foresaw change, growth, transformation in the existing condition of things.  Those great corporations the East and West India Companies were already producing a new organism out of the political and commercial chaos which had been so long brooding over civilization.  Visions of an imperial zone extending from the little Batavian island around the earth, a chain of forts and factories dotting the newly-discovered and yet undiscovered points of vantage, on island or promontory, in every sea; a watery, nebulous, yet most substantial empire—­not fantastic, but practical—­not picturesque and mediaeval, but modern and lucrative—­a world-wide commonwealth with a half-submerged metropolis, which should rule the ocean with its own fleets and, like Venice and Florence, job its land wars with mercenary armies—­all these dreams were not the cloudy pageant of a poet but the practical schemes of a great creative mind.  They were destined to become reality.  Had the geographical conditions been originally more favourable than they were, had Nature been less a stepmother to the metropolis of the rising Batavian realm, the creation might have been more durable.  Barneveld, and the men who acted with him, comprehended their age, and with slender materials were prepared to do great things.  They did not look very far perhaps into futurity, but they saw the vast changes already taking place, and felt the throb of forces actually at work.