Thus the year 1609 is a memorable one in the world’s history.  It forms a great landmark in human progress.  It witnessed the recognition of a republic, powerful in itself, and whose example was destined to be most influential upon the career of two mighty commonwealths of the future.  The British empire, just expanding for wider flight than it had hitherto essayed, and about to pass through a series of vast revolutions, gathering strength of wing as it emerged from cloud after cloud; and the American republic, whose frail and obscure beginnings at that very instant of time scarcely attracted a passing attention from the contemporaneous world—­both these political organisms, to which so much of mankind’s future liberties had been entrusted, were deeply indebted to the earlier self-governing commonwealth.

The Dutch republic was the first free nation to put a girdle of empire around the earth.  It had courage, enterprise, intelligence, perseverance, faith in itself, the instinct of self-government and self-help, hatred of tyranny, the disposition to domineer, aggressiveness, greediness, inquisitiveness, insolence, the love of science, of liberty, and of money—­all this in unlimited extent.  It had one great defect, it had no country.  Upon that meagre standing ground its hand had moved the world with an impulse to be felt through all the ages, but there was not soil enough in those fourteen thousand, square miles to form the metropolis of the magnificent empire which the genius of liberty had created beyond the seas.

That the political institutions bequeathed by the United States of the seventeenth century have been vastly improved, both in theory and practice, by the United States of the nineteenth, no American is likely to gainsay.  That the elder Republic showed us also what to avoid, and was a living example of the perils besetting a Confederacy which dared not become a Union, is a lesson which we might take closely to heart.

But the year 1609 was not only memorable as marking an epoch in Dutch history.  It was the beginning of a great and universal pause.  The world had need of rest.  Disintegration had been going on too rapidly, and it was absolutely necessary that there should be a new birth, if civilization were not to vanish.

A twenty years’ truce between the Turkish and Holy Roman empires was nearly simultaneous with the twelve years’ truce between Spain and the United Provinces.  The Emperor Rudolph having refused to ratify the treaty which his brother Matthias had made, was in consequence partially discrowned.  The same archduke who, thirty years before, had slipped away from Vienna in his nightgown; with his face blackened, to outwit and outgeneral William the Silent at Brussels, was now—­more successful in his manoeuvres against his imperial brother.  Standing at the head of his army in battle array, in the open fields before the walls of Prague, he received—­from the unfortunate Rudolph the crown and regalia of Hungary, and was by solemn treaty declared sovereign of that ancient and chivalrous kingdom.