ren 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 abou