but
simply as a part of the understanding arrived at by Great Britain and
France. It was for the sake of their own security that the English
plenipotentiaries were willing to give up their conquests in North
America as compensation for the evacuation of those portions of Belgium
and of the Republic that the French forces occupied, and the restoration
of the barrier fortresses.

After peace was concluded, not only the Orange partisans but the great
mass of the people, who had so long been excluded from all share of
political power, desired a drastic reform of the government. They had
conferred sovereign authority upon William, and would have willingly
increased it, in the hope that he would in his person be a centre of
unity to the State, and would use his power for the sweeping away of
abuses. It was a vain hope. He never attempted to do away, root and
branch, with the corrupt municipal oligarchies, but only to make them
more tolerable by the infusion of a certain amount of new blood.

The birth of an heir on March 8,1748, caused great rejoicings, for it
promised permanence to the new order of things. Whatever the prince had
firmly taken in hand would have met with popular approval, but William
had little power of initiative or firmness of principle. He allowed his
course of action to be swayed now by one set of advisers, now by their
opponents. Even in the matter of the farmers of the revenue, the
best-hated men throughout the Republic and especially in Holland, it
required popular tumults and riots at Haarlem, Leyden, the Hague and
Amsterdam, in which the houses of the obnoxious officials were
attacked and sacked, to secure the abolition of a system by which the
proceeds of taxation were diverted from the service of the State to fill
the pockets of venal and corrupt officials. In Amsterdam the spirit of
revolt against the domination of the Town Council by a few patrician
families led to serious disorders and armed conflicts in which blood
was shed; and in September, 1748, the prince, at the request of the
Estates, visited the turbulent city. As the Town Council proved
obstinate in refusing to make concessions, the stadholder was compelled
to take strong action. The Council was dismissed from office, but here,
as elsewhere, the prince was averse from making a drastic purge; out of
the thirty-six members, more than half, nineteen, were restored. The new
men, who thus took their seats in the Town Council, obtained the