or the States as representing the people, had deliberately chosen a republican system, but because they could get no powerful monarch to accept the sovereignty.  They had offered to become subjects of Protestant England and of Catholic France.  Both powers had refused the offer, and refused it with something like contumely.  However deep the subsequent regret on the part of both, there was no doubt of the fact.  But the internal policy in all the provinces, and in all the towns, was republican.  Local self-government existed everywhere.  Each city magistracy was a little republic in itself.  The death of William the Silent, before he had been invested with the sovereign power of all seven provinces, again left that sovereignty in abeyance.  Was the supreme power of the Union, created at Utrecht in 1579, vested in the States-General?

They were beginning theoretically to claim it, but Barneveld denied the existence of any such power either in law or fact.  It was a league of sovereignties, he maintained; a confederacy of seven independent states, united for certain purposes by a treaty made some thirty years before.  Nothing could be more imbecile, judging by the light of subsequent events and the experience of centuries, than such an organization.  The independent and sovereign republic of Zealand or of Groningen, for example, would have made a poor figure campaigning, or negotiating, or exhibiting itself on its own account before the world.  Yet it was difficult to show any charter, precedent, or prescription for the sovereignty of the States-General.  Necessary as such an incorporation was for the very existence of the Union, no constitutional union had ever been enacted.  Practically the Province of Holland, representing more than half the population, wealth, strength, and intellect of the whole confederation, had achieved an irregular supremacy in the States-General.  But its undeniable superiority was now causing a rank growth of envy, hatred, and jealousy throughout the country, and the great Advocate of Holland, who was identified with the province, and had so long wielded its power, was beginning to reap the full harvest of that malice.

Thus while there was so much of vagueness in theory and practice as to the sovereignty, there was nothing criminal on the part of Maurice if he was ambitious of obtaining the sovereignty himself.  He was not seeking to compass it by base artifice or by intrigue of any kind.  It was very natural that he should be restive under the dictatorship of the Advocate.  If a single burgher and lawyer could make himself despot of the Netherlands, how much more reasonable that he—­with the noblest blood of Europe in his veins, whose direct ancestor three centuries before had been emperor not only of those provinces, but of all Germany and half Christendom besides, whose immortal father had under God been the creator and saviour of the new commonwealth, had made sacrifices such as man never made for a people, and had at last