d Nature been less a stepmother to the metropolis of
the rising Batavian realm, the creation might have been more durable.
Barneveld, and the men who acted with him, comprehended their age, and
with slender materials were prepared to do great things. They did not
look very far perhaps into futurity, but they saw the vast changes
already taking place, and felt the throb of forces actually at work.

The days were gone when the iron-clad man on horseback conquered a
kingdom with his single hand. Doubtless there is more of poetry and
romance in his deeds than in the achievements of the counting-house
aristocracy, the hierarchy of joint-stock corporations that was taking
the lead in the world's affairs. Enlarged views of the social compact and
of human liberty, as compared with those which later generations ought to
take, standing upon the graves, heaped up mountains high, of their
predecessors, could hardly be expected of them. But they knew how to do
the work before them. They had been able to smite a foreign and
sacerdotal tyranny into the dust at the expense of more blood and more
treasure, and with sacrifices continued through a longer cycle of years,
than had ever been recorded by history.

Thus the Advocate believed that the chief fruits of the war--political
independence, religious liberty, commercial expansion--could be now
secured by diplomacy, and that a truce could be so handled as to become
equivalent to a peace. He required no bribes therefore to labour for that
which he believed to be for his own interests and for those of the
country.

First citizen of Holland, perpetual chairman of a board of ambitious
shopkeepers who purposed to dictate laws to the world from their
counting-house table, with an unerring eye for the interests of the
commonwealth and his own, with much vision, extraordinary eloquence, and
a magnificent will, he is as good a sample of a great burgher--an
imposing not a heroic figure--as the times had seen.

A vast stride had been taken in the world's progress. Even monopoly was
freedom compared to the sloth and ignorance of an earlier epoch and of
other lands, and although the days were still far distant when the earth
was to belong to mankind, yet the modern republic was leading, half
unconsciously, to a period of wider liberty of government, commerce, and
above all of thought.

Meantime, the period assigned for the departure of the Spanish
commissioners, unless they brought a satisfacto