into
the contracted spheres of their not remote past. But to feel how a little
confederacy of seven provinces loosely tied together by an ill-defined
treaty could hold so prominent and often so controlling a place in the
European system of the seventeenth century, we must remember that there
was then no Germany, no Russia, no Italy, no United States of America,
scarcely even a Great Britain in the sense which belongs to that mighty
empire now.

France, Spain, England, the Pope, and the Emperor were the leading powers
with which the Netherlands were daily called on to solve great problems
and try conclusions; the study of political international equilibrium,
now rapidly and perhaps fortunately becoming one of the lost arts, being
then the most indispensable duty of kings and statesmen.

Spain and France, which had long since achieved for themselves the
political union of many independent kingdoms and states into which they
had been divided were the most considerable powers and of necessity
rivals. Spain, or rather the House of Austria divided into its two great
branches, still pursued its persistent and by no means fantastic dream of
universal monarchy. Both Spain and France could dispose of somewhat
larger resources absolutely, although not relatively, than the Seven
Provinces, while at least trebling them in population. The yearly revenue
of Spain after deduction of its pledged resources was perhaps equal to a
million sterling, and that of France with the same reservation was about
as much. England had hardly been able to levy and make up a yearly income
of more than L600,000 or L700,000 at the end of Elizabeth's reign or in
the first years of James, while the Netherlands had often proved
themselves capable of furnishing annually ten or twelve millions of
florins, which would be the equivalent of nearly a million sterling.

The yearly revenues of the whole monarchy of the Imperial house of
Habsburg can scarcely be stated at a higher figure than L350,000.

Thus the political game--for it was a game--was by no means a desperate
one for the Netherlands, nor the resources of the various players so
unequally distributed as at first sight it might appear.

The emancipation of the Provinces from the grasp of Spain and the
establishment by them of a commonwealth, for that epoch a very free one,
and which contained within itself the germs of a larger liberty,
religious, political, and commercial, than had yet been known, wa