past accounts; an ignorance in which it is probable that the Duke himself shared to the fullest extent.  His enemies stoutly maintained that, however loosely his accounts had been kept, he had been very careful to make no mistakes against himself, and that he had retired full of wealth, if not of honor, from his long and terrible administration.  His own letters, on the contrary, accused the King of ingratitude, in permitting an old soldier to ruin himself, not only in health but in fortune, for want of proper recompense during an arduous administration.  At any rate it is very certain that the rebellion had already been an expensive matter to the Crown.  The army in the Netherlands numbered more than sixty-two thousand men, eight thousand being Spaniards, the rest Walloons and Germans.  Forty millions of dollars had already been sunk, and it seemed probable that it would require nearly the whole annual produce of the American mines to sustain the war.  The transatlantic gold and silver, disinterred from the depths where they had been buried for ages, were employed, not to expand the current of a healthy, life-giving commerce, but to be melted into blood.  The sweat and the tortures of the King’s pagan subjects in the primeval forests of the New World, were made subsidiary to the extermination of his Netherland people, and the destruction of an ancient civilization.  To this end had Columbus discovered a hemisphere for Castile and Aragon, and the new Indies revealed their hidden treasures?

Forty millions of ducats had been spent.  Six and a half millions of arrearages were due to the army, while its current expenses were six hundred thousand a month.  The military expenses alone of the Netherlands were accordingly more than seven millions of dollars yearly, and the mines of the New World produced, during the half century of Philip’s reign, an average of only eleven.  Against this constantly increasing deficit, there was not a stiver in the exchequer, nor the means of raising one.  The tenth penny had been long virtually extinct, and was soon to be formally abolished.  Confiscation had ceased to afford a permanent revenue, and the estates obstinately refused to grant a dollar.  Such was the condition to which the unrelenting tyranny and the financial experiments of Alva had reduced the country.

It was, therefore, obvious to Requesens that it would be useful at the moment to hold out hopes of pardon and reconciliation.  He saw, what he had not at first comprehended, and what few bigoted supporters of absolutism in any age have ever comprehended, that national enthusiasm, when profound and general, makes a rebellion more expensive to the despot than to the insurgents.  “Before my arrival,” wrote the Grand Commander to his sovereign, “I did not understand how the rebels could maintain such considerable fleets, while your Majesty could not support a single one.  It appears, however, that men who are fighting for their lives, their firesides, their