being ruled.  They were satisfied with their historical institutions, and preferred the mixture of hereditary sovereignty with popular representation, to which they were accustomed.  They did not devise an a priori constitution.  Philip having violated the law of reason and the statutes of the land, was deposed, and a new chief magistrate was to be elected in his stead.  This was popular sovereignty in fact, but not in words.  The deposition and election could be legally justified only by the inherent right of the people to depose and to elect; yet the provinces, in their Declaration of Independence, spoke of the divine right of kings, even while dethroning, by popular right, their own King!

So also, in the instructions given by the states to their envoys charged to justify the abjuration before the Imperial diet held at Augsburg, twelve months later, the highest ground was claimed for the popular right to elect or depose the sovereign, while at the same time, kings were spoken of as “appointed by God.”  It is true that they were described, in the same clause, as “chosen by the people”—­which was, perhaps, as exact a concurrence in the maxim of Vox populi, vox Dei, as the boldest democrat of the day could demand.  In truth, a more democratic course would have defeated its own ends.  The murderous and mischievous pranks of Imbize, Ryhove, and such demagogues, at Ghent and elsewhere, with their wild theories of what they called Grecian, Roman, and Helvetian republicanism, had inflicted damage enough on the cause of freedom, and had paved the road for the return of royal despotism.  The senators assembled at the Hague gave more moderate instructions to their delegates at Augsburg.  They were to place the King’s tenure upon contract—­not an implied one, but a contract as literal as the lease of a farm.  The house of Austria, they were to maintain, had come into the possession of the seventeen Netherlands upon certain express conditions, and with the understanding that its possession was to cease with the first condition broken.  It was a question of law and fact, not of royal or popular right.  They were to take the ground, not only that the contract had been violated, but that the foundation of perpetual justice upon which it rested; had likewise been undermined.  It was time to vindicate both written charters and general principles.  “God has given absolute power to no mortal man,” said Saint Aldegonde, “to do his own will against all laws and all reason.”  “The contracts which the King has broken are no pedantic fantasies,” said the estates, “but laws planted by nature in the universal heart of mankind, and expressly acquiesced in by prince and people.”  All men, at least, who speak the English tongue, will accept the conclusion of the provinces, that when laws which protected the citizen against arbitrary imprisonment and guaranteed him a trial in his own province—­which forbade the appointment of foreigners to high office—­which secured the property of the citizen from taxation,