remains undisputed as ever.  Neither the nation, in mass, nor the citizens, in class, lay claim to human rights.  All upper attributes—­legislative, judicial, administrative—­remain in the land-master’s breast alone.  It is an absurdity, therefore, to argue with Grotius concerning the unknown antiquity of the Batavian republic.  The republic never existed at all till the sixteenth century, and was only born after long years of agony.  The democratic instincts of the ancient German savages were to survive in the breasts of their cultivated descendants, but an organized, civilized, republican polity had never existed.  The cities, as they grew in strength, never claimed the right to make the laws or to share in the government.  As a matter of fact, they did make the laws, and shared, beside, in most important functions of sovereignty, in the treaty-making power, especially.  Sometimes by bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises, or good hard blows they extorted their charters.  Their codes, statutes, joyful entrances, and other constitutions were dictated by the burghers and sworn to by the monarch.  They were concessions from above; privileges private laws; fragments indeed of a larger liberty, but vastly, better than the slavery for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and violent days, would have yielded little nutriment; but they still rather sought to reconcile themselves, by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which they had invaded, than to overturn the system.  Thus the cities, not regarding themselves as representatives or aggregations of the people, became fabulous personages, bodies without souls, corporations which had acquired vitality and strength enough to assert their existence.  As persons, therefore—­gigantic individualities—­they wheeled into the feudal ranks and assumed feudal powers and responsibilities.  The city of Dort; of Middelburg, of Ghent, of Louvain, was a living being, doing fealty, claiming service, bowing to its lord, struggling with its equals, trampling upon its slaves.

Thus, in these obscure provinces, as throughout Europe, in a thousand remote and isolated corners, civilization builds itself up, synthetically and slowly; yet at last, a whole is likely to get itself constructed.  Thus, impelled by great and conflicting forces, now obliquely, now backward, now upward, yet, upon the whole, onward, the new Society moves along its predestined orbit, gathering consistency and strength as it goes.  Society, civilization, perhaps, but hardly humanity.  The people has hardly begun to extricate itself from the clods in which it lies buried.  There are only nobles, priests, and, latterly, cities.  In the northern Netherlands, the degraded condition of the mass continued longest.  Even in Friesland, liberty, the dearest blessing of the ancient Frisians, had been forfeited in a variety of ways.  Slavery was both voluntary and compulsory.  Paupers sold