It is impossible not to notice the simplicity and patience with which the Advocate, in the discharge of his duty as minister of foreign affairs, kept the leading envoys of the Republic privately informed of events which were becoming day by day more dangerous to the public interests and his own safety.  If ever a perfectly quiet conscience was revealed in the correspondence of a statesman, it was to be found in these letters.

Calmly writing to thank Caron for some very satisfactory English beer which the Ambassador had been sending him from London, he proceeded to speak again of the religious dissensions and their consequences.  He sent him the letter and remonstrance which he had felt himself obliged to make, and which he had been urged by his ever warm and constant friend the widow of William the Silent to make on the subject of “the seditious libels, full of lies and calumnies got up by conspiracy against him.”  These letters were never published, however, until years after he had been in his grave.

“I know that you are displeased with the injustice done me,” he said, “but I see no improvement.  People are determined to force through the National Synod.  The two last ones did much harm.  This will do ten times more, so intensely embittered are men’s tempers against each other.”  Again he deplored the King’s departure from his letters of 1613, by adherence to which almost all the troubles would have been spared.

It is curious too to observe the contrast between public opinion in Great Britain, including its government, in regard to the constitution of the United Provinces at that period of domestic dissensions and incipient civil war and the general impressions manifested in the same nation two centuries and a half later, on the outbreak of the slavery rebellion, as to the constitution of the United States.

The States in arms against the general government on the other side of the Atlantic were strangely but not disingenuously assumed to be sovereign and independent, and many statesmen and a leading portion of the public justified them in their attempt to shake off the central government as if it were but a board of agency established by treaty and terminable at pleasure of any one of among sovereigns and terminable at pleasure of any one of them.

Yet even a superficial glance at the written constitution of the Republic showed that its main object was to convert what had been a confederacy into an Incorporation; and that the very essence of its renewed political existence was an organic law laid down by a whole people in their primitive capacity in place of a league banding together a group of independent little corporations.  The chief attributes of sovereignty—­the rights of war and peace, of coinage, of holding armies and navies, of issuing bills of credit, of foreign relations, of regulating and taxing foreign commerce—­having been taken from the separate States by the united people thereof and bestowed upon a government provided with a single executive head, with a supreme tribunal, with a popular house of representatives and a senate, and with power to deal directly with the life and property of every individual in the land, it was strange indeed that the feudal, and in America utterly unmeaning, word Sovereign should have been thought an appropriate term for the different States which had fused themselves three-quarters of a century before into a Union.