mpossible to compel a war-vessel of the
republic to surrender. Hardly an instance was on her naval record of
submission, even to far superior force, while it was filled with the
tragic but heroic histories of commanders who had blown their ships, with
every man on board, into the air, rather than strike their flag. Such was
the character, and such the capacity of the sea-born republic.

That republic had serious and radical defects, but the design remained to
be imitated and improved upon, centuries afterwards. The history of the
rise and progress of the Dutch republic is a leading chapter in the
history of human liberty.

The great misfortune of the commonwealth of the United Provinces, next to
the slenderness of its geographical proportions, was the fact that it was
without a centre and without a head, and therefore not a nation capable
of unlimited vitality. There were seven states. Each claimed to be
sovereign. The pretension on the part of several of them was ridiculous.
Overyssel, for example, contributed two and three-quarters per cent. of
the general budget. It was a swamp of twelve hundred square miles in
extent, with some heath-spots interspered, and it numbered perhaps a
hundred thousand inhabitants. The doughty Count of Embden alone could
have swallowed up such sovereignty, have annexed all the buckwheat
patches and cranberry marshes of Overyssel to his own meagre territories,
and nobody the wiser.

Zeeland, as we have seen, was disposed at a critical moment to set up its
independent sovereignty. Zeeland, far more important than Overyssel, had
a revenue of perhaps five hundred thousand dollars,--rather a slender
budget for an independent republic, wedged in as it was by the most
powerful empires of the earth, and half drowned by the ocean, from which
it had scarcely emerged.

There was therefore no popular representation, and on the other hand no
executive head. As sovereignty must be exercised in some way, however, in
all living commonwealths, and as a low degree of vitality was certainly
not the defect of those bustling provinces, the supreme functions had now
fallen into the hands of Holland.

While William the Silent lived, the management of war, foreign affairs,
and finance, for the revolted provinces, was in his control. He was aided
by two council boards, but the circumstances of history and the character
of the man had invested him with an inevitable dictatorship.

After his death, at least aft