The simple act of union was not regarded as the constitution of a commonwealth.  Its object was a single one—­defence against a foreign oppressor.  The contracting parties bound themselves together to spend all their treasure and all their blood in expelling the foreign soldiery from their soil.  To accomplish this purpose, they carefully abstained from intermeddling with internal politics and with religion.  Every man was to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.  Every combination of citizens, from the provincial states down to the humblest rhetoric club, was to retain its ancient constitution.  The establishment of a Republic, which lasted two centuries, which threw a girdle of rich dependencies entirely round the globe, and which attained so remarkable a height of commercial prosperity and political influence, was the result of the Utrecht Union; but, it was not a premeditated result.  A state, single towards the rest of the world, a unit in its external relations, while permitting internally a variety of sovereignties and institutions—­in many respects the prototype of our own much more extensive and powerful union—­was destined to spring from the act thus signed by the envoys of five provinces.  Those envoys were acting, however, under the pressure of extreme necessity, and for what was believed an evanescent purpose.  The future confederacy was not to resemble the system of the German empire, for it was to acknowledge no single head.  It was to differ from the Achaian league, in the far inferior amount of power which it permitted to its general assembly, and in the consequently greater proportion of sovereign attributes which were retained by the individual states.  It was, on the other hand, to furnish a closer and more intimate bond than that of the Swiss confederacy, which was only a union for defence and external purposes, of cantons otherwise independent.  It was, finally, to differ from the American federal commonwealth in the great feature that it was to be merely a confederacy of sovereignties, not a representative Republic.  Its foundation was a compact, not a constitution.  The contracting parties were states and corporations, who considered themselves as representing small nationalities ‘dejure et de facto’, and as succeeding to the supreme power at the very instant in which allegiance to the Spanish monarch was renounced.  The general assembly was a collection of diplomatic envoys, bound by instructions from independent states.  The voting was not by heads, but by states.  The deputies were not representatives of the people, but of the states; for the people of the United States of the Netherlands never assembled—­as did the people of the United States of America two centuries later—­to lay down a constitution, by which they granted a generous amount of power to the union, while they reserved enough of sovereign attributes to secure that local self-government which is the life-blood of liberty.