of oligarchic
States.

The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to
offer a closer parallel to this of Britain. But a ruthless fanaticism,
religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the
Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs. Spain fought with grandeur,
heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the
suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour
frustrate and her devotion vain. She warred against the light, and the
enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races
and generations unborn. What criterion of truth, what principle even
of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to
assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting
as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our
fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of
Spain? England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods
the methods of Spain. The war in Africa--is it then a war waged for
the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the
triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria? But, it is
urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same
stubborn, unyielding stock as our own." In the sense that they are
Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the
characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking,
and the Norseman. The best blood of the Teutonic race for six
centuries went to the making of England. At the period when the
Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the
English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the
empire of the future. As for the former clause of the assertion, it is
accurate of no race, no nation. The history of the United Provinces
does not close with John de Witt and William III. Can those critics of
the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes,
and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland
in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars,
the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and
in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to
Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested
by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of
Amsterdam to Br