Utrecht, and Overyssel) against the decree for the National Synod as a breach of the Union, declaring it to be therefore null and void and binding upon no man.  He had dictated the protest as oldest member present, while Grotius as the youngest had acted as scribe.  He would have supported the Synod if legally voted, but would have preferred the convocation, under the authority of all the provinces, of a general, not a national, synod, in which, besides clergy and laymen from the Netherlands, deputations from all Protestant states and churches should take part; a kind of Protestant oecumenical council.

As to the enlistment, by the States of a province, of soldiers to keep the peace and suppress tumults in its cities during times of political and religious excitement, it was the most ordinary of occurrences.  In his experience of more than forty years he had never heard the right even questioned.  It was pure ignorance of law and history to find it a novelty.

To hire temporarily a sufficient number of professional soldiers, he considered a more wholesome means of keeping the peace than to enlist one portion of the citizens of a town against another portion, when party and religious spirit was running high.  His experience had taught him that the mutual hatred of the inhabitants, thus inflamed, became more lasting and mischievous than the resentment caused through suppression of disorder by an armed and paid police of strangers.

It was not only the right but the most solemn duty of the civil authority to preserve the tranquillity, property, and lives of citizens committed to their care.  “I have said these fifty years,” said Barneveld, “that it is better to be governed by magistrates than mobs.  I have always maintained and still maintain that the most disastrous, shameful, and ruinous condition into which this land can fall is that in which the magistrates are overcome by the rabble of the towns and receive laws from them.  Nothing but perdition can follow from that.”

There had been good reason to believe that the French garrisons as well as some of the train bands could not be thoroughly relied upon in emergencies like those constantly breaking out, and there had been advices of invasion by sympathizers from neighbouring countries.  In many great cities the civil authority had been trampled upon and mob rule had prevailed.  Certainly the recent example in the great commercial capital of the country—­where the house of a foremost citizen had been besieged, stormed, and sacked, and a virtuous matron of the higher class hunted like a wild beast through the streets by a rabble grossly ignorant of the very nature of the religious quibble which had driven them mad, pelted with stones, branded with vilest names, and only saved by accident from assassination, while a church-going multitude looked calmly on—­with constantly recurring instances in other important cities were sufficient reasons for the authorities to be watchful.