During the last twenty years of the great war the material prosperity of the Netherlands had wonderfully increased.  They had, become the first commercial nation in the world.  They had acquired the supremacy of the seas.  The population of Amsterdam had in twenty years increased from seventy thousand to a hundred and thirty thousand, and was destined to be again more than doubled in the coming decade.  The population of Antwerp had sunk almost as rapidly as that of its rival had increased; having lessened by fifty thousand during the same period.  The commercial capital of the obedient provinces, having already lost much of its famous traffic by the great changes in the commercial current of the world, was unable to compete with the cities of the United Provinces in the vast trade which the geographical discoveries of the preceding century had opened to civilization.  Freedom of thought and action were denied, and without such liberty it was impossible for oceanic commerce to thrive.  Moreover, the possession by the Hollanders of the Scheld forts below Antwerp, and of Flushing at the river’s mouth, suffocated the ancient city, and would of itself have been sufficient to paralyze all its efforts.

In Antwerp the exchange, where once thousands of the great merchants of the earth held their daily financial parliament, now echoed to the solitary footfall of the passing stranger.  Ships lay rotting at the quays; brambles grow in the commercial streets.  In Amsterdam the city had been enlarged by two-thirds, and those who swarmed thither to seek their fortunes could not wait for the streets to be laid out and houses to be built, but established themselves in the environs, building themselves hovels and temporary residences, although certain to find their encampments swept away with the steady expanse of the city.  As much land as could be covered by a man’s foot was worth a ducat in gold.

In every branch of human industry these republicans took the lead.  On that scrap of solid ground, rescued by human energy from the ocean, were the most fertile pastures in the world.  On those pastures grazed the most famous cattle in the world.  An ox often weighed more than two thousand pounds.  The cows produced two and three calves at a time, the sheep four and five lambs.  In a single village four thousand kine were counted.  Butter and cheese were exported to the annual value of a million, salted provisions to an incredible extent.  The farmers were industrious, thriving, and independent.  It is an amusing illustration of the agricultural thrift and republican simplicity of this people that on one occasion a farmer proposed to Prince Maurice that he should marry his daughter, promising with her a dowry of a hundred thousand florins.