The condition of the republic and of the Spanish Provinces was, at that moment, most signally contrasted.  If the effects of despotism and of liberty could ever be exhibited at a single glance, it was certainly only necessary to look for a moment at the picture of the obedient and of the rebel Netherlands.

Since the fall of Antwerp, the desolation of Brabant, Flanders, and of the Walloon territories had become complete.  The King had recovered the great commercial capital, but its commerce was gone.  The Scheldt, which, till recently, had been the chief mercantile river in the world, had become as barren as if its fountains had suddenly dried up.  It was as if it no longer flowed to the ocean, for its mouth was controlled by Flushing.  Thus Antwerp was imprisoned and paralyzed.  Its docks and basins, where 2500 ships had once been counted, were empty, grass was growing in its streets, its industrious population had vanished, and the Jesuits had returned in swarms.  And the same spectacle was presented by Ghent, Bruges, Valenciennes, Tournay, and those other fair cities, which had once been types of vigorous industry and tumultuous life.  The sea-coast was in the hands of two rising commercial powers, the great and free commonwealths of the future.  Those powers were acting in concert, and commanding the traffic of the world, while the obedient Provinces were excluded from all foreign intercourse and all markets, as the result of their obedience.  Commerce, manufactures, agriculture; were dying lingering deaths.  The thrifty farms, orchards, and gardens, which had been a proverb and wonder of industry were becoming wildernesses.  The demand for their produce by the opulent and thriving cities, which had been the workshops of the world, was gone.  Foraging bands of Spanish and Italian mercenaries had succeeded to the famous tramp of the artizans and mechanics, which had often been likened to an army, but these new customers were less profitable to the gardeners and farmers.  The clothiers, the fullers, the tapestry-workers, the weavers, the cutlers, had all wandered away, and the cities of Holland, Friesland, and of England, were growing skilful and rich by the lessons and the industry of the exiles to whom they afforded a home.  There were villages and small towns in the Spanish Netherlands that had been literally depopulated.  Large districts of country had gone to waste, and cane-brakes and squalid morasses usurped the place of yellow harvest-fields.  The fog, the wild boar, and the wolf, infested the abandoned homes of the peasantry; children could not walk in safety in the neighbourhood even of the larger cities; wolves littered their young in the deserted farm-houses; two hundred persons, in the winter of 1586-7, were devoured by wild beasts in the outskirts of Ghent.  Such of the remaining labourers and artizans as had not been converted into soldiers, found their most profitable employment as brigands, so that the portion of the population spared by war