“Wherefore, if the preservation of our beloved fatherland is dear to you, I exhort you to maintain that great fundamental resolution, at all times and against all men, even if this should cause the departure of the enemy’s commissioners.  What can you expect from them but evil fruit?”

He then advised all the estates and magistracies which he was addressing to instruct their deputies, at the approaching session of the States-General, to hold on to the first article of the often-cited preliminary resolution without allowing one syllable to be altered.  Otherwise nothing could save the commonwealth from dire and notorious confusion.  Above all, he entreated them to act in entire harmony and confidence with himself and his cousin, even as they had ever done with his illustrious father.

Certainly the prince fully deserved the confidence of the States, as well for his own signal services and chivalrous self-devotion, as for the unexampled sacrifices and achievements of William the Silent.  His words had the true patriotic ring of his father’s frequent and eloquent appeals; and I have not hesitated to give these extracts from his discourse, because comparatively few of such utterances of Maurice have been preserved, and because it gives a vivid impression of the condition of the republic and the state of parties at that momentous epoch.  It was not merely the fate of the United Netherlands and the question of peace or war between the little republic and its hereditary enemy that were upon the issue.  The peace of all Christendom, the most considerable material interests of civilization, and the highest political and moral principles that can influence human action, were involved in those negotiations.

There were not wanting many to impeach the purity of the stadholder’s motives.  As admiral or captain-general, he received high salaries, besides a tenth part of all prize-money gained at sea by the fleets, or of ransom and blackmail on land by the armies of the republic.  His profession, his ambition, his delights, were those of a soldier.  As a soldier in a great war, he was more necessary to his countrymen than he could expect to be as a statesman in time of peace.  But nothing ever appeared in public or in private, which threw a reasonable suspicion upon his lofty patriotism.  Peace he had always believed to be difficult of attainment.  It had now been proved impossible.  A truce he honestly considered a pitfall of destruction, and he denounced it, as we have seen, in the language of energetic conviction.  He never alluded to his pecuniary losses in case peace should be made.  His disinterested patriotism was the frequent subject of comment in the most secret letters of the French ambassadors to the king.  He had repeatedly refused enormous offers if he would forsake the cause of the republic.  The King of France was ever ready to tempt him with bribes, such as had proved most efficacious with men as highly born and as highly placed as a cadet of the house of Orange-Nassau.  But there is no record that Jeannin assailed him at this crisis with such temptations, although it has not been pretended that the prince was obdurate to the influence of Mammon when that deity could be openly approached.