he found it strong enough
and sufficiently well provisioned to have held out many a long day. But
it had been demonstrated to the besieged that relief was impossible, and
that the surrender on one day or another, after the siege operations
should be brought to their close, was certain. The inexorable genius of
the commander--skilled in a science which to the coarser war-makers of
that age seemed almost superhuman--hovered above them like a fate. It was
as well to succumb on the 24th June as to wait till the 24th July.

Moreover the great sustaining principle--resistance to the
foreigner--which had inspired the deeds of daring, the wonders of
endurance, in the Dutch cities beleaguered so remorselessly by the
Spaniard twenty years earlier in the century, was wanting.

In surrendering to the born Netherlander--the heroic chieftain of the
illustrious house of Nassau--these Netherlanders were neither sullying
their flag nor injuring their country. Enough had been done for military
honour in the gallant resistance, in which a large portion of the
garrison had fallen. Nor was that religious superstition so active within
the city, which three years before had made miracles possible in Paris
when a heretic sovereign was to be defied by his own subjects. It was
known that even if the public ceremonies of the Catholic Church were
likely to be suspended for a time after the surrender, at least the
rights of individual conscience and private worship within individual
households would be tolerated, and there was no papal legate with fiery
eloquence persuading a city full of heroic dupes that it was more
virtuous for men or women to eat their own children than to forego one
high mass, or to wink at a single conventicle.

After all, it was no such bitter hardship for the citizens of
Gertruydenberg to participate in the prosperity of the rising and
thriving young republic, and to enjoy those municipal and national
liberties which her sister cities had found so sweet.

Nothing could be calmer or more reasonable than such a triumph, nothing
less humiliating or less disastrous than such a surrender.

The problem was solved, the demonstration was made. To open their gates
to the soldiers of the Union was not to admit the hordes of a Spanish
commander with the avenging furies of murder, pillage, rape, which ever
followed in their train over the breach of a captured city.

To an enemy bated or dreaded to the uttermost mortal capacity, t