verse, the republic had been reproduced.
A commonwealth of sand-banks, lagoons, and meadows, less than fourteen
thousand square miles in extent, had done battle, for nearly half a
century, with the greatest of existing powers, a realm whose territory
was nearly a third of the globe, and which claimed universal monarchy.
And this had been done with an army averaging forty-six thousand men,
half of them foreigners hired by the job, and by a sea-faring population,
volunteering into ships of every class and denomination, from a fly-boat
to a galleot of war.

And when the republic had won its independence, after this almost eternal
warfare, it owed four or five millions of dollars, and had sometimes an
annual revenue of nearly that amount.

It was estimated by Barneveld, at the conclusion of the truce, that the
interest on the public debt of Spain was about thrice the amount of the
yearly income of the republic, and it was characteristic of the financial
ideas of the period, that fears were entertained lest a total repudiation
of that burthen by the Spanish Government would enable it to resume the
war against the provinces with redoubled energy.

The annual salary of Prince Maurice, who was to see his chief occupation
gone by the cessation of the war, was fixed by the States at 120,000
florins. It was agreed, that in case of his marriage he should receive a
further yearly sum of 25,000 florins, and this addition was soon
afterwards voted to him outright, it being obvious that the prince would
remain all his days a bachelor.

Count Frederic Henry likewise received a military salary of 25,000
florins, while the emoluments of Lewis William were placed at 36,000
florins a year.

It must be admitted that the republic was grateful. 70,000 dollars a
year, in the seventeenth century, not only for life, but to be inherited
afterwards by his younger brother, Frederic Henry, was surely a
munificent sum to be accorded from the puny exchequer of the
States-General to the chief magistrate of the nation.

The mighty transatlantic republic, with its population of thirty or forty
millions, and its revenue of five hundred millions of dollars, pays
25,000 dollars annually for its president during his four years of
office, and this in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a
dollar is worth scarcely one-fifth of its value two hundred and fifty
years ago.

Surely here is improvement, both in the capacity to produce and in the
p