ommunication to the
States-General. They indulged in the usual cheap commonplaces on the
effusion of blood, the calamities of war, and the blessings of peace, and
assured the States of the very benignant disposition of their Highnesses
at Brussels.

The States-General, in their reply, seventeen days afterwards, remarking
that the archdukes persisted in their unfounded pretensions of authority
over them, took occasion to assure their Highnesses that they had no
chance to obtain such authority except by the sword. Whether they were
like to accomplish much in that way the history of the past might
sufficiently indicate, while on the other hand the States would always
claim the right, and never renounce the hope, of recovering those
provinces which had belonged to their free commonwealth since the union
of Utrecht, and which force and fraud had torn away.

During twenty-five years that union had been confirmed as a free state by
solemn decrees, and many public acts and dealings with the mightiest
potentates of Europe, nor could any other answer now be made to the
archdukes than the one always given to his holy Roman Imperial Majesty,
and other princes, to wit, that no negotiations could be had with powers
making any pretensions in conflict with the solemn decrees and
well-maintained rights of the United Netherlands.

It was in this year that two words became more frequent in the mouths of
men than they had ever been before; two words which as the ages rolled on
were destined to exercise a wider influence over the affairs of this
planet than was yet dreamed of by any thinker in Christendom. Those words
were America and Virginia. Certainly both words were known before,
although India was the more general term for these auriferous regions of
the west, which, more than a century long, had been open to European
adventure, while the land, baptized in honour of the throned Vestal, had
been already made familiar to European ears by the exploits of Raleigh.
But it was not till 1607 that Jamestown was founded, that Captain John
Smith's adventures with Powhattan, "emperor of Virginia," and his
daughter the Princess Pocahontas, became fashionable topics in England,
that the English attempts to sail up the Chickahominy to the Pacific
Ocean--as abortive as those of the Netherlanders to sail across the North
Pole to Cathay--were creating scientific discussion in Europe, and that
the first cargo of imaginary gold dust was exported from t