general farming interests of the republic.
Moreover, the number of agricultural peasants was comparatively small.
The lower classes were rather accustomed to plough the sea than the land,
and their harvests were reaped from that element, which to Hollanders and
Zeelanders was less capricious than the solid earth. Almost every
inhabitant of those sea-born territories was, in one sense or another, a
mariner; for every highway was a canal; the soil was percolated by rivers
and estuaries, pools and meres; the fisheries were the nurseries in which
still more daring navigators rapidly learned their trade, and every child
took naturally to the ocean as to its legitimate home.

The "people," therefore, thus enthroned by the Leicestrians over all the
inhabitants of the country, appeared to many eyes rather a misty
abstraction, and its claim of absolute sovereignty a doctrine almost as
fantastic as that of the divine right of kings. The Netherlanders were,
on the whole, a law-abiding people, preferring to conduct even a
revolution according to precedent, very much attached to ancient usages
and traditions, valuing the liberties, as they called them, which they
had wrested from what had been superior force, with their own right
hands, preferring facts to theories, and feeling competent to deal with
tyrants in the concrete rather than to annihilate tyranny in the abstract
by a bold and generalizing phraseology. Moreover the opponents of the
Leicester party complained that the principal use to which this newly
discovered "people" had been applied, was to confer its absolute
sovereignty unconditionally upon one man. The people was to be sovereign
in order that it might immediately abdicate in favour of the Earl.

Utrecht, the capital of the Leicestrians, had already been deprived of
its constitution. The magistracy was, according to law, changed every
year. A list of candidates was furnished by the retiring board, an equal
number of names was added by the governor of the Province, and from the
catalogue thus composed the governor with his council selected the new
magistrates for the year. But De Villiers, the governor of the Province,
had been made a prisoner by the enemy in the last campaign; Count Moeurs
had been appointed provisional stadholder by the States; and, during his
temporary absence on public affairs, the Leicestrians had seized upon the
government, excluded all the ancient magistrates, banished many leading
citizens fr