discuss them is dangerous; but,
if the majority of this assembly decide otherwise, there remains but one
course for the friends of Protestantism and liberty, and that is, to
retire to the colonies in the West Indies, and there found a new country,
where their consciences and their persons will be beyond the reach of
tyranny and despotism." The States General decided to "reject the hard
and intolerable conditions proposed by their lordships the Kings of
France and Great Britain, and to defend this state and its inhabitants
with all their might." The province of Holland in its entirety followed
the example of Amsterdam; the dikes were everywhere broken down, at the
same time that the troops of the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony were
advancing to the aid of the United Provinces, and that the emperor was
signing with those two princes a defensive alliance for the maintenance
of the treaties of Westphalia, the Pyrenees, and Aix-la-Chapelle.

Louis XIV. could no longer fly from conquest to conquest; henceforth his
troops had to remain on observation; care for his pleasures recalled him
to France; he left the command-in-chief of his army to M. de Turenne, and
set out for St. Germain, where he arrived on the 1st of August. Before
leaving Holland, he had sent home almost without ransom twenty thousand
prisoners of war, who before long entered the service of the States
again. "It was an excess of clemency of which I had reason afterwards
to repent," says the king himself. His mistake was, that he did not
understand either Holland or the new chief she had chosen.

Dispirited and beaten, like his country, John van Witt had just given in
his resignation as councillor pensionary of Holland. He wrote to Ruyter
on the 5th of August, as follows: "The capture of the towns on the Rhine
in so short a time, the irruption of the enemy as far as the banks of the
Yssel, and the total loss of the provinces of Gueldres, Utrecht, and
Over-Yssel, almost without resistance and through unheard-of poltroonery,
if not treason, on the part of certain people, have more and more
convinced me of the truth of what was in olden times applied to the Roman
republic: _Successes are claimed by everybody, reverses are put down to
one (Prospera omnes sibi vindicant, adversa uni imputantur)_. That is my
own experience. The people of Holland have not only laid at my door all
the disasters and calamities that have befallen our republic; they have
not b