and." Long after the rest of the province had begun to
prepare for a year of famine, Orissa kept on exporting. In March, when
the alarm was first raised, the southwest monsoon had set in, rendering
the harbours inaccessible. Thus the district was isolated. It was
no longer possible to apply the wholesome policy which was operating
throughout the rest of the country. The doomed population of Orissa,
like passengers in a ship without provisions, were called upon to suffer
the extremities of famine; and in the course of the spring and summer of
1866, some seven hundred thousand people perished.

January, 1869.

X. SPAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS. [31]

[31] History of the United Netherlands: from the Death of William
the Silent to the Twelve Years' Truce, 1609. By John Lothrop Motley, D.
C. L. In four volumes. Vols. III. and IV. New York. 1868.

Tandem fit surculus arbor: the twig which Mr. Motley in his earlier
volumes has described as slowly putting forth its leaves and rootless,
while painfully struggling for existence in a hostile soil, has at last
grown into a mighty tree of liberty, drawing sustenance from all
lands, and protecting all civilized peoples with its pleasant shade.
We congratulate Mr. Motley upon the successful completion of the second
portion of his great work; and we think that the Netherlanders of our
time have reason to be grateful to the writer who has so faithfully and
eloquently told the story of their country's fearful struggle against
civil and ecclesiastical tyranny, and its manifold contributions to the
advancement of European civilization.

Mr. Motley has been fortunate in his selection of a subject upon which
to write. Probably no century of modern times lends itself to the
purposes of the descriptive historian so well as the sixteenth. While on
the one hand the problems which it presents are sufficiently near for
us to understand them without too great an effort of the imagination, on
the other hand they are sufficiently remote for us to study them without
passionate and warping prejudice. The contest between Catholicism and
the reformed religion--between ecclesiastical autocracy and the right of
private investigation--has become a thing of the past, and constitutes
a closed chapter in human history. The epoch which begins where Mr.
Motley's history is designed to close--at the peace of Westphalia--is
far more complicated. Since the middle of the seventeenth century a
double mo