CHAPTER XXII.

Struggle of the United Provinces against Philip of Spain—­Progress of the Republic—­Influence of Geographical position on the fate of the Netherlands—­Contrast offered by America—­Miserable state of the so—­called “obedient” provinces—­Prosperity of the Commonwealth—­Its internal government—­Tendency to provincialism—­Quibbles of the English Members of the Council, Wilkes and Bodley—­Exclusion of Olden-Barneveld from the State Council—­Proposals of Philip for mediation with the United Provinces—­The Provinces resolutely decline all proffers of intervention.

The United Provinces had now been engaged in unbroken civil war for a quarter of a century.  It is, however, inaccurate to designate this great struggle with tyranny as a civil war.  It was a war for independence, maintained by almost the whole population of the United Provinces against a foreigner, a despot, alien to their blood, ignorant of their language, a hater of their race, a scorner of their religion, a trampler upon their liberties, their laws, and institutions—­a man who had publicly declared that he would rather the whole nation were exterminated than permitted to escape from subjection to the Church of Rome.  Liberty of speech, liberty of the press, liberty of thought on political, religious, and social questions existed within those Dutch pastures and Frisian swamps to a far greater degree than in any other part of the world at that day; than in very many regions of Christendom in our own time.  Personal slavery was unknown.  In a large portion of their territory it had never existed.  The free Frisians, nearest blood-relations of, in this respect, the less favoured Anglo-Saxons, had never bowed the knee to the feudal system, nor worn nor caused to be worn the collar of the serf.  In the battles for human liberty no nation has stood with cleaner hands before the great tribunal, nor offered more spotless examples of patriotism to be emulated in all succeeding ages, than the Netherlanders in their gigantic struggle with Philip of Spain.  It was not a class struggling for their own privileges, but trampling on their fellow-men in a lower scale of humanity.  Kings and aristocrats sneered at the vulgar republic where Hans Miller, Hans Baker, and Hans Brewer enjoyed political rights end prated of a sovereignty other than that of long-descended races and of anointed heads.  Yet the pikemen of Spain and the splendid cavalry and musketeers of Italy and Burgundy, who were now beginning to show their backs both behind entrenchments and in the open field to their republican foes, could not deny the valour with which the battles of liberty were fought; while Elizabeth of England, maintainer, if such ever were, of hereditary sovereignty and hater of popular freedom, acknowledged that for wisdom in council, dignity and adroitness in diplomatic debate, there were none to surpass the plain burgher statesmen of the new republic.