nd her powerful fleets.--[Grotius,
xv. 715]

The Dutch cruisers watched so carefully on the track of the
homeward-bound argosies, that the traffic was becoming more dangerous
than lucrative, particularly since the public law established by Admiral
Fazardo, that it was competent for naval commanders to hang, drown, or
burn the crews of the enemy's merchantmen.

The Portuguese were still more malcontent than the Spaniards. They had
gained little by the absorption of their kingdom by Spain, save
participation in the war against the republic, the result of which had
been to strip them almost entirely of the conquests of Vasco de Gama and
his successors, and to close to them the ports of the Old World and the
New.

In the republic there was a party for peace, no doubt, but peace only
with independence. As for a return to their original subjection to Spain
they were unanimously ready to accept forty years more of warfare rather
than to dream of such a proposition. There were many who deliberately
preferred war to peace. Bitter experience had impressed very deeply on
the Netherlanders the great precept that faith would never be kept with
heretics. The present generation had therefore been taught from their
cradles to believe that the word peace in Spanish mouths simply meant the
Holy Inquisition. It was not unnatural, too, perhaps, that a people who
had never known what it was to be at peace might feel, in regard to that
blessing, much as the blind or the deaf towards colour or music; as
something useful and agreeable, no doubt, but with which they might the
more cheerfully dispense, as peculiar circumstances had always kept them
in positive ignorance of its nature. The instinct of commercial
greediness made the merchants of Holland and Zeeland, and especially
those of Amsterdam, dread the revival of Antwerp in case of peace, to the
imagined detriment of the great trading centres of the republic. It was
felt also to be certain that Spain, in case of negotiations, would lay
down as an indispensable preliminary the abstinence on the part of the
Netherlanders from all intercourse with the Indies, East or West; and
although such a prohibition would be received by those republicans with
perfect contempt, yet the mere discussion of the subject moved their
spleen. They had already driven the Portuguese out of a large portion of
the field in the east, and they were now preparing by means of the same
machinery to dispute the monopol