, he was to
supply himself with the array of historical facts stretching over a
longer period than the lifetime of many of his judges, and with the
proper legal and historical arguments upon those facts for the
justification of his course. That memory and brain were capacious and
powerful enough for the task. It was well for the judges that they had
bound themselves, at the outset, by an oath never to make known what
passed in the courtroom, but to bury all the proceedings in profound
secrecy forever. Had it been otherwise, had that been known to the
contemporary public which has only been revealed more than two centuries
later, had a portion only of the calm and austere eloquence been heard in
which the Advocate set forth his defence, had the frivolous and ignoble
nature of the attack been comprehended, it might have moved the very
stones in the streets to mutiny. Hateful as the statesman had been made
by an organized system of calumny, which was continued with unabated
vigour and increased venom sine he had been imprisoned, there was enough
of justice and of gratitude left in the hearts of Netherlanders to resent
the tyranny practised against their greatest man, and the obloquy thus
brought against a nation always devoted to their liberties and laws.

That the political system of the country was miserably defective was no
fault of Barneveld. He was bound by oath and duty to administer, not make
the laws. A handful of petty feudal sovereignties such as had once
covered the soil of Europe, a multitude of thriving cities which had
wrested or purchased a mass of liberties, customs, and laws from their
little tyrants, all subjected afterwards, without being blended together,
to a single foreign family, had at last one by one, or two by two, shaken
off that supremacy, and, resuming their ancient and as it were
decapitated individualities, had bound themselves by treaty in the midst
of a war to stand by each other, as if they were but one province, for
purposes of common defence against the common foe.

There had been no pretence of laying down a constitution, of enacting an
organic law. The day had not come for even the conception of a popular
constitution. The people had not been invented. It was not provinces
only, but cities, that had contracted with each other, according to the
very first words of the first Article of Union. Some of these cities,
like Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, were Catholic by overwhelming majority, and