unswick?

The heroic period of the United Provinces in action, art, and
literature began and ended in the deep-hearted resolution of the race
to perish rather than forgo the right to worship God in their own way.
In the history of this State, from Philip II to Louis XIV, religious
oppression seems to play a part almost like that of individual genius
in Macedon or in modern France. When that force is withdrawn, there is
an end to the greatness of Holland, as when a Charlemagne, an
Alexander, or a Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies
also. In the passion for political greatness as such, the Dutch have
never found the spur, the incitement to heroic action or to heroic
self-renunciation which religion for a time supplied.

From false judgments false deeds follow, else it were but harsh
ingratitude to recall, or even to remember, the decay, the humiliations
of the land within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Vondel and
Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, worked, and suffered.

But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we encounter resemblances to
the democratic Empire of Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an
impressive and even tragic significance. For though the stage on which
Athens acts her part is narrower, the idea which informs the action is
not less elevated and serene. A purpose yet more exultant, a hope as
living, and an impulse yet more mystic and transcendent, sweeps the
warriors of Islam beyond the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then
through Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western Sea, tracing
within the quarter of a century dominated by the genius of Omar the
bounds of an empire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred years.
But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, passes swifter than a
dream; the tyranny and the crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad
succeed.

And now after twelve centuries a democratic Empire, raised up and
exalted for ends as mystic and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam
of Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the question of questions to
every student of speculative politics at the present hour is--Whither
will this portent direct its energies? Will it press onward towards
some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint,
sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically
inexhaustible forces to waste unused?

The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires the men from every
region of