anquished foe
what they had spurned from their prince. To be exiled from the ocean was
an unimaginable position for the republic. Moreover, to retire from the
Indies would be to abandon her Oriental allies, and would be a dishonour
as well us a disaster. Her good faith, never yet contaminated, would be
stained, were she now to desert the distant peoples and potentates with
whom she had formed treaties of friendship and commerce, and hand them
over to the vengeance of the Spaniards and Portuguese.

And what a trade it was which the United Provinces were thus called upon
to renounce! The foreign commerce of no other nation could be compared in
magnitude to that of their commonwealth. Twenty ships traded regularly to
Guinea, eighty to the Cape de Verd Islands, twenty to America, and forty
to the East Indies. Ten thousand sailors, who gained their living in this
traffic, would be thrown out of employment, if the States should now
listen to the Spanish propositions.

It was well known too that the profits of the East India Company had
vastly increased of late, and were augmenting with every year. The trade
with Cambay, Malabar, Ceylon, Koromandel, and Queda, had scarcely begun,
yet was already most promising. Should the Hollanders only obtain a
footing in China, they felt confident of making their way through the
South Seas and across the pole to India. Thus the search for a great
commercial highway between Cathay, Europe, and the New World, which had
been baffled in the arctic regions, should be crowned with success at the
antarctic, while it was deemed certain that there were many lands,
lighted by the Southern Cross, awaiting the footsteps of the fortunate
European discoverer. What was a coasting-trade with Spain compared with
this boundless career of adventure? Now that the world's commerce, since
the discovery of America and the passage around the Cape of Good Hope,
had become oceanic and universal, was the nation which took the lead on
blue water to go back to the creeping land-locked navigation of the
ancient Greeks and Phoenicians? If the East India Company, in whose womb
was empire, were now destroyed, it would perish with its offspring for
ever. There would be no regeneration at a future day. The Company's ships
too were a navy in themselves, as apt for war as for trade. This the
Spaniards and Portuguese had already learned to their cost. The
merchant-traders to Spain would be always in the power of Spain, and at