Familiar with the gigantic budgets of our own day, we listen with something like wonder, now that two centuries and a half have passed, to the fierce denunciations by the war party of these figures as wilful fictions.  Science has made in that interval such gigantic strides.  The awful intellect of man may at last make war impossible for his physical strength.  He can forge but cannot wield the hammer of Thor; nor has Science yet discovered the philosopher’s stone.  Without it, what exchequer can accept chronic warfare and escape bankruptcy?  After what has been witnessed in these latest days, the sieges and battles of that distant epoch seem like the fights of pigmies and cranes.  Already an eighty years’ war, such as once was waged, has become inconceivable.  Let two more centuries pass away, and perhaps a three weeks’ campaign may exhaust an empire.

Meantime the war of words continued.  A proclamation with penalties was issued by the States against the epidemic plague of pamphlets or “blue-books,” as those publications were called in Holland, but with little result.  It was not deemed consistent with liberty by those republicans to put chains on the press because its utterances might occasionally be distasteful to magistrates.  The writers, printers, and sellers of the “blue-books” remained unpunished and snapped their fingers at the placard.

We have seen the strenuous exertions of the Nassaus and their adherents by public appeals and private conversation to defeat all schemes of truce.  The people were stirred by the eloquence of the two stadholders.  They were stung to fury against Spain and against Barneveld by the waspish effusions of the daily press.  The magistrates remained calm, and took part by considerable majorities with Barneveld.  That statesman, while exercising almost autocratic influence in the estates, became more and more odious to the humbler classes, to the Nassaus, and especially to the Calvinist clergy.  He was denounced, as a papist, an atheist, a traitor, because striving for an honourable peace with the foe, and because admitting the possibility of more than one road to the kingdom of Heaven.  To doubt the infallibility of Calvin was as heinous a crime, in the eyes of his accusers, as to kneel to the host.  Peter Titelmann, half a century earlier, dripping with the blood of a thousand martyrs, seemed hardly a more loathsome object to all Netherlanders than the Advocate now appeared to his political enemies, thus daring to preach religious toleration, and boasting of, humble ignorance as the safest creed.  Alas! we must always have something to persecute, and individual man is never so convinced of his own wisdom as when dealing with subjects beyond human comprehension.