s," said the estates, "but laws planted by nature in the
universal heart of mankind, and expressly acquiesced in by prince and
people." All men, at least, who speak the English tongue, will accept the
conclusion of the provinces, that when laws which protected the citizen
against arbitrary imprisonment and guaranteed him a trial in his own
province--which forbade the appointment of foreigners to high
office--which secured the property of the citizen from taxation, except
by the representative body--which forbade intermeddling on the part of
the sovereign with the conscience of the subject in religious
matters--when such laws had been subverted by blood tribunals, where
drowsy judges sentenced thousands to stake and scaffold without a hearing
by excommunication, confiscation, banishment-by hanging, beheading,
burning, to such enormous extent and with such terrible monotony that the
executioner's sword came to be looked upon as the only symbol of
justice--then surely it might be said, without exaggeration, that the
complaints of the Netherlanders were "no pedantic fantasies," and that
the King had ceased to perform his functions as dispenser of God's
justice.

The Netherlanders dealt with facts. They possessed a body of laws,
monuments of their national progress, by which as good a share of
individual liberty was secured to the citizen as was then enjoyed in any
country of the world. Their institutions admitted of great improvement,
no doubt; but it was natural that a people so circumstanced should be
unwilling to exchange their condition for the vassalage of "Moors or
Indians."

At the same time it may be doubted whether the instinct for political
freedom only would have sustained them in the long contest, and whether
the bonds which united them to the Spanish Crown would have been broken,
had it not been for the stronger passion for religious liberty, by which
so large a portion of the people was animated. Boldly as the united
states of the Netherlands laid down their political maxima, the quarrel
might perhaps have been healed if the religious question had admitted of
a peaceable solution. Philip's bigotry amounting to frenzy, and the
Netherlanders of "the religion" being willing, in their own words, "to
die the death" rather than abandon the Reformed faith, there was upon
this point no longer room for hope. In the act of abjuration, however, it
was thought necessary to give offence to no class of the inhabitants, but