had subsequently either fallen away from the confederacy or been
conquered.

And as if to make assurance doubly sure, the Articles of Union not only
reserved to each province all powers not absolutely essential for
carrying on the war in common, but by an express article (the 13th),
declared that Holland and Zealand should regulate the matter of religion
according to their own discretion, while the other provinces might
conform to the provisions of the "Religious Peace" which included mutual
protection for Catholics and Protestants--or take such other order as
seemed most conducive to the religious and secular rights of the
inhabitants. It was stipulated that no province should interfere with
another in such matters, and that every individual in them all should
remain free in his religion, no man being molested or examined on account
of his creed. A farther declaration in regard to this famous article was
made to the effect that no provinces or cities which held to the Roman
Catholic religion were to be excluded from the League of Union if they
were ready to conform to its conditions and comport themselves
patriotically. Language could not be devised to declare more plainly than
was done by this treaty that the central government of the League had
neither wish nor right to concern itself with the religious affairs of
the separate cities or provinces. If it permitted both Papists and
Protestants to associate themselves against the common foe, it could
hardly have been imagined, when the Articles were drawn, that it would
have claimed the exclusive right to define the minutest points in a
single Protestant creed.

And if the exclusively secular parts of the polity prevailing in the
country were clumsy, irregular, and even monstrous, and if its defects
had been flagrantly demonstrated by recent events, a more reasonable
method of reforming the laws might have been found than the imprisonment
of a man who had faithfully administered them forty years long.

A great commonwealth had grown out of a petty feudal organism, like an
oak from an acorn in a crevice, gnarled and distorted, though
wide-spreading and vigorous. It seemed perilous to deal radically with
such a polity, and an almost timid conservatism on the part of its
guardians in such an age of tempests might be pardonable.

Moreover, as before remarked, the apparent imbecility resulting from
confederacy and municipalism combined was for a season remedied by the
ac