History of the United Netherlands, 1590a | Page 9

at birth, it must increase our admiration of human
energy and of the sustaining influence of municipal liberty that the
republic, even if transitory, should yet have girdled the earth with its
possessions and held for a considerable period so vast a portion of the
world in fee.
What a lesson to our transatlantic commonwealth, whom bountiful

nature had blessed at her birth beyond all the nations of history and
seemed to speed upon an unlimited career of freedom and peaceful
prosperity, should she be capable at the first alarm on her track to throw
away her inestimable advantages! If all history is not a mockery and a
fable, she may be sure that the nation which deliberately carves itself in
pieces and, substitutes artificial boundaries for the natural and historic
ones, condemns itself either to extinction or to the lower life of political
insignificance and petty warfare, with the certain loss of liberty and
national independence at last. Better a terrible struggle, better the
sacrifice of prosperity and happiness for years, than the eternal setting
of that great popular hope, the United American Republic.
I speak in this digression only of the relations of physical nature to
liberty and nationality, making no allusion to the equally stringent
moral laws which no people can violate and yet remain in health and
vigour.
Despite a quarter of a century of what is commonly termed civil war,
the United Netherlands were prosperous and full of life. It was in the
provinces which had seceded from the union of Utrecht that there was
silence as of the grave, destitution, slavery, abject submission to a
foreign foe. The leaders in the movement which had brought about the
scission of 1579--commonly called the 'Reconciliation'--enjoyed
military and civil posts under a foreign tyrant, but were poorly
rewarded for subserviency in fighting against their own brethren by
contumely on the part of their masters. As for the mass of the people it
would be difficult to find a desolation more complete than that
recorded of the "obedient" provinces. Even as six years before, wolves
littered their whelps in deserted farmhouses, cane-brake and thicket
usurped the place of cornfield and, orchard, robbers swarmed on the
highways once thronged by a most thriving population, nobles begged
their bread in the streets of cities whose merchants once entertained
emperors and whose wealth and traffic were the wonder of the world,
while the Spanish viceroy formally permitted the land in the
agricultural districts to be occupied and farmed by the first comer for
his own benefit, until the vanished proprietors of the soil should make
their re-appearance.
"Administered without justice or policy," said a Netherlander who was
intensely loyal to the king and a most uncompromising Catholic, "eaten

up and abandoned for that purpose to the arbitrary will of foreigners
who suck the substance and marrow of the land without benefit to the
king, gnaw the obedient cities to the bones, and plunder the open
defenceless country at their pleasure, it may be imagined how much
satisfaction these provinces take in their condition. Commerce and
trade have ceased in a country which traffic alone has peopled, for
without it no human habitation could be more miserable and poor than
our land."--[Discours du Seigneur de Champagny sur les affaires des
Pays Bas, 21 Dec. 1589. Bibl. de Bourgogne, MS. No. 12,962.]
Nothing could be more gloomy than the evils thus described by the
Netherland statesman and soldier, except the remedy which he
suggested. The obedient provinces, thus scourged and blasted for their
obedience, were not advised to improve their condition by joining
hands with their sister States, who had just constituted themselves by
their noble resistance to royal and ecclesiastical tyranny into a free and
powerful commonwealth. On the contrary, two great sources of
regeneration and prosperity were indicated, but very different ones
from those in which the republic had sought and found her strength. In
the first place, it was suggested as indispensable that the obedient
provinces should have more Jesuits and more Friars. The mendicant
orders should be summoned to renewed exertions, and the king should
be requested to send seminary priests to every village in numbers
proportionate to the population, who should go about from house to
house, counting the children, and seeing that they learned their
catechism if their parents did not teach them, and, even in case they did,
examining whether it was done thoroughly and without deception.
In the second place it was laid down as important that the bishops
should confirm no one who had not been sufficiently catechized. "And
if the mendicant orders," said Champagny, "are not numerous enough
for these catechizations, the Jesuits might charge themselves therewith,
not more and not less than the said mendicants, some of each being
deputed to each parish. To