d, as we have already pointed out,
infected to a certain extent the official and commercial classes in the
Dutch republic at this epoch. There is, however, another side of the
picture. The people of the United Provinces in their long struggle for
existence, as a free and independent state, had had all the dormant
energies and qualities of which their race was capable called into
intense and many-sided activity, with the result that the quickening
impulse, which had been sent thrilling through the veins, and which had
made the pulses to throb with the stress of effort and the eagerness of
hope, penetrated into every department of thought and life. When the
treaty of Muenster was signed, Holland had taken her place in the very
front rank in the civilised world, as the home of letters, science and
art, and was undoubtedly the most learned state in Europe.

In an age when Latin was the universal language of learning, it was this
last fact which loomed largest in the eyes of contemporaries. The wars
and persecutions which followed the Reformation made Holland the place
of refuge of many of the most adventurous spirits, the choicest
intellects and the most independent thinkers of the time. Flemings and
Walloons, who fled from Alva and the Inquisition, Spanish and Portuguese
Jews driven out by the fanaticism of Philip II, French Huguenots and
German Calvinists, found within the borders of the United Provinces a
country of adoption, where freedom of the press and freedom of opinion
existed to a degree unknown elsewhere until quite modern times. The
social condition of the country, the disappearance of a feudal nobility,
and the growth of a large and well-to-do burgher aristocracy in whose
hands the government of the republic really lay, had led to a
widespread diffusion of education and culture. All travellers in 17th
century Holland were struck by the evidences which met their eyes, in
all places that they visited, of a general prosperity combined with
great simplicity of life and quiet domesticity. Homely comfort was to be
seen everywhere, but not even in the mansions of the merchant princes of
Amsterdam was there any ostentatious display of wealth and luxury.
Probably of no other people could it have been said that "amongst the
Dutch it was unfashionable not to be a man of business[6]." And yet, in
spite of this, there was none of that narrowness of outlook, which is
generally associated with burgher-society immersed in trade