History of the United Netherlands, 1590a | Page 8

Hans Miller, Hans Baker, and
Hans Brewer enjoyed political rights end prated of a sovereignty other
than that of long-descended races and of anointed heads. Yet the
pikemen of Spain and the splendid cavalry and musketeers of Italy and

Burgundy, who were now beginning to show their backs both behind
entrenchments and in the open field to their republican foes, could not
deny the valour with which the battles of liberty were fought; while
Elizabeth of England, maintainer, if such ever were, of hereditary
sovereignty and hater of popular freedom, acknowledged that for
wisdom in council, dignity and adroitness in diplomatic debate, there
were none to surpass the plain burgher statesmen of the new republic.
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 defined limits of tongue, history or race. Accident
or human caprice seemed to have divided German Highland from
German Netherland; Belgic Gaul from the rest of the Gallic realm. And
even from the slender body, which an arbitrary destiny had set off for
centuries into a separate organism, tyranny and religious bigotry had
just hewn another portion away. But the commonwealth was already
too highly vitalized to permit peaceful dismemberment. Only the low
organisms can live in all their parts after violent separations. The trunk
remained, bleeding but alive and vigorous, while the amputated portion
lay for centuries in fossilized impotence.
Never more plainly than in the history of this commonwealth was the
geographical law manifested by which the fate of nations is so deeply
influenced. Courage, enterprise amounting almost to audacity, and a
determined will confronted for a long lapse of time the inexorable, and
permitted a great empire to germinate out of a few sand-banks held in
defiance of the ocean, and protected from human encroachments on the
interior only by the artificial barrier of custom-house and fort.
Thus foredoomed