had ever arranged the details of a series of
battles and sieges against the Spaniard. And he was proving himself as
consummate master in political strife as in the great science of war.

He no longer made any secret of his conviction that Barneveld was a
traitor to his country, bought with Spanish gold. There was not the
slightest proof for these suspicions, but he asserted them roundly. "The
Advocate is travelling straight to Spain," he said to Count Cuylenborg.
"But we will see who has got the longest purse."

And as if it had been a part of the campaign, a prearranged diversion to
the more direct and general assault on the entrenchments of the States'
right party, a horrible personal onslaught was now made from many
quarters upon the Advocate. It was an age of pamphleteering, of venomous,
virulent, unscrupulous libels. And never even in that age had there been
anything to equal the savage attacks upon this great statesman. It moves
the gall of an honest man, even after the lapse of two centuries and a
half, to turn over those long forgotten pages and mark the depths to
which political and theological party spirit could descend. That human
creatures can assimilate themselves so closely to the reptile, and to the
subtle devil within the reptile, when a party end is to be gained is
enough to make the very name of man a term of reproach.

Day by day appeared pamphlets, each one more poisonous than its
predecessor. There was hardly a crime that was not laid at the door of
Barneveld and all his kindred. The man who had borne a matchlock in early
youth against the foreign tyrant in days when unsuccessful rebellion
meant martyrdom and torture; who had successfully guided the councils of
the infant commonwealth at a period when most of his accusers were in
their cradles, and when mistake was ruin to the republic; he on whose
strong arm the father of his country had leaned for support; the man who
had organized a political system out of chaos; who had laid down the
internal laws, negotiated the great indispensable alliances, directed the
complicated foreign policy, established the system of national defence,
presided over the successful financial administration of a state
struggling out of mutiny into national existence; who had rocked the
Republic in its cradle and ever borne her in his heart; who had made her
name beloved at home and honoured and dreaded abroad; who had been the
first, when the great Taciturn had at last fa