And at least these Netherlanders were consistent with themselves.  They had come to disbelieve in the mystery of kingcraft, in the divine speciality of a few transitory mortals to direct the world’s events and to dictate laws to their fellow-creatures.  What they achieved was for the common good of all.  They chose to live in an atmosphere of blood and fire for generation after generation rather than flinch from their struggle with despotism, for they knew that, cruel as the sea, it would swallow them all at last in one common destruction if they faltered or paused.  They fought for the liberty of all.  And it is for this reason that the history of this great conflict deserved to be deeply pondered by those who have the instinct of human freedom.  Had the Hollanders basely sunk before the power of Spain, the proud history of England, France, and Germany would have been written in far different terms.  The blood and tears which the Netherlanders caused to flow in their own stormy days have turned to blessings for remotest climes and ages.  A pusillanimous peace, always possible at any period of their war, would have been hailed with rapture by contemporary statesmen, whose names have vanished from the world’s memory; but would have sown with curses and misery the soil of Europe for succeeding ages.  The territory of the Netherlands is narrow and meagre.  It is but a slender kingdom now among the powers of the earth.  The political grandeur of nations is determined by physical causes almost as much as by moral ones.  Had the cataclysm which separated the fortunate British islands from the mainland happened to occur, instead, at a neighbouring point of the earth’s crust; had the Belgian, Dutch, German and Danish Netherland floated off as one island into the sea, while that famous channel between two great rival nations remained dry land, there would have been a different history of the world.

But in the 16th century the history of one country was not an isolated chapter of personages and events.  The history of the Netherlands is history of liberty.  It was now combined with the English, now with French, with German struggles for political and religious freedom, but it is impossible to separate it from the one great complex which makes up the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries.

At that day the Netherland republic was already becoming a power of importance in the political family of Christendom.  If, in spite of her geographical disadvantages, she achieved so much, how much vaster might her power have grown, how much stronger through her example might popular institutions throughout the world have become, and how much more pacific the relations of European tribes, had nature been less niggard in her gifts to the young commonwealth.  On the sea she was strong, for the ocean is the best of frontiers; but on land her natural boundaries faded vaguely away, without strong physical demarcations and with no sharply