icane and quarrels. To press such a measure is merely to inflict a
disgrace upon us. It is an attempt to prevent us from helping the
Elector-Palatine and the other Protestant princes of Germany and
coreligionists everywhere against hostile violence. For the
Elector-Palatine can receive aid from us and from Great Britain through
the duchies only. It is plainly the object of the enemy to seclude us
from the Palatine and the rest of Protestant Germany. It is very
suspicious that the proposition of Prince Maurice, supported by the two
kings and the united princes of Germany, has been rejected."

The Advocate knew well enough that the religious franchises granted by
the House of Habsburg at the very moment in which Spain signed her peace
with the Netherlands, and exactly as the mad duke of Cleve was
expiring--with a dozen princes, Catholic and Protestant, to dispute his
inheritance--would be valuable just so long as they could be maintained
by the united forces of Protestantism and of national independence and no
longer. What had been extorted from the Catholic powers by force would be
retracted by force whenever that force could be concentrated. It had been
necessary for the Republic to accept a twelve years' truce with Spain in
default of a peace, while the death of John of Cleve, and subsequently of
Henry IV., had made the acquisition of a permanent pacification between
Catholicism and Protestantism, between the League and the Union, more
difficult than ever. The so-called Thirty Years' War--rather to be called
the concluding portion of the Eighty Years' War--had opened in the
debateable duchies exactly at the moment when its forerunner, the forty
years' war of the Netherlands, had been temporarily and nominally
suspended. Barneveld was perpetually baffled in his efforts to obtain a
favourable peace for Protestant Europe, less by the open diplomacy and
military force of the avowed enemies of Protestantism than by the secret
intrigues and faintheartedness of its nominal friends. He was unwearied
in his efforts simultaneously to arouse the courts of England and France
to the danger to Europe from the overshadowing power of the House of
Austria and the League, and he had less difficulty in dealing with the
Catholic Lewis and his mother than with Protestant James. At the present
moment his great designs were not yet openly traversed by a strong
Protestant party within the very republic which he administered.

"Look to it with