ees. To root it
out they had butchered, drowned, shot, strangled, poisoned, tortured,
roasted alive, buried alive, starved, and driven mad, thousands and tens
of thousands of their fellow creatures. And behold there had been almost
a century of this work, and yet the great truth was not rooted out after
all; and the devil-worshippers, who had sought at the outset of the great
war to establish the Holy Inquisition in the Netherlands upon the ruins
of religious and political liberty, were overthrown at last and driven
back into the pit. It was progress; it was worth all the blood and
treasure which had been spilled, that, instead of the Holy Inquisition,
there was now holy liberty of thought.

That there should have been a party, that there should have been an
individual here and there, after the great victory was won, to oppose the
doctrine which the Catholic president now so nobly advocated, would be
enough to cause every believer in progress to hide his face in the dust,
did we not know that the march of events was destined to trample such
opposition out of existence, and had not history proved to us that the
great lesson of the war was not to be rendered nought by the efforts of a
few fanatics. Religious liberty was the ripened and consummate fruit, and
it could not but be gathered.

"Consider too," continued the president, "how much injury your refusal,
if you give it, will cause to those of your religion in the places where
they are the weakest, and where they are every day imploring with tears
and lamentations the grace of those Catholic sovereigns to whom they are
subject, to enable them to enjoy the same religious liberty which our
king is now demanding in favour of the Catholics among you. Do not cause
it to come again into the minds of those sovereigns and their peoples,
whom an inconsiderate zeal has often driven into violence and ferocity
against protestants, that a war to compel the weakest to follow the
religion of the strongest is just and lawful."

Had not something been gained for the world when this language was held
by a Catholic on the very spot where less than a half century before the
whole population of the Netherlands, men, women, and children, had been
condemned to death by a foreign tyrant, for the simple reason that it was
just, legal, and a Christian duty to punish the weak for refusing to
follow the religion of the strong?

"As for the perils which some affect to fear," said Jeannin, furth