orld's
commerce, in which it had learned to play so controlling a part, must
have ceased to exist. For without foreign navigation the independent
republic was an inconceivable idea. Not only would it have been incapable
of continuing the struggle with the greatest monarch in the world, but it
might as well have buried itself once and for ever beneath the waves from
which it had scarcely emerged. Commerce and Holland were simply
synonymous terms. Its morsel of territory was but the wharf to which the
republic was occasionally moored; its home was in every ocean and over
all the world. Nowhere had there ever existed before so large a
proportion of population that was essentially maritime. They were born
sailors--men and women alike--and numerous were the children who had
never set foot on the shore. At the period now treated of the republic
had three times as many ships and sailors as any one nation in the world.
Compared with modern times, and especially with the gigantic commercial
strides of the two great Anglo-Saxon families, the statistics both of
population and of maritime commerce in that famous and most vigorous
epoch would seem sufficiently meagre. Yet there is no doubt that in the
relative estimate of forces then in activity it would be difficult to
exaggerate the naval power of the young commonwealth. When therefore,
towards the close of Philip II.'s reign, it became necessary to renounce
the carrying trade with Spain and Portugal, by which the communication
with India and China was effected, or else to submit to the confiscation
of Dutch ships in Spanish ports, and the confinement of Dutch sailors in
the dungeons of the Inquisition, a more serious dilemma was presented to
the statesmen of the Netherlands than they had ever been called upon to
solve.

For the splendid fiction of the Spanish lake was still a formidable fact.
Not only were the Portuguese and Spaniards almost the only direct traders
to the distant East, but even had no obstacles been interposed by
Government, the exclusive possession of information as to the course of
trade, the pre-eminent practical knowledge acquired by long experience of
that dangerous highway around the world at a time when oceanic navigation
was still in its infancy, would have given a monopoly of the traffic to
the descendants of the bold discoverers who first opened the great path
to the world's commerce.

The Hollanders as a nation had never been engaged in the direct tra