period of their war, would have been hailed
with rapture by contemporary statesmen, whose names have vanished from
the world's memory; but would have sown with curses and misery the soil
of Europe for succeeding ages. The territory of the Netherlands is narrow
and meagre. It is but a slender kingdom now among the powers of the
earth. The political grandeur of nations is determined by physical causes
almost as much as by moral ones. Had the cataclysm which separated the
fortunate British islands from the mainland happened to occur, instead,
at a neighbouring point of the earth's crust; had the Belgian, Dutch,
German and Danish Netherland floated off as one island into the sea,
while that famous channel between two great rival nations remained dry
land, there would have been a different history of the world.

But in the 16th century the history of one country was not an isolated
chapter of personages and events. The history of the Netherlands is
history of liberty. It was now combined with the English, now with
French, with German struggles for political and religious freedom, but it
is impossible to separate it from the one great complex which makes up
the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth
centuries.

At that day the Netherland republic was already becoming a power of
importance in the political family of Christendom. If, in spite of her
geographical disadvantages, she achieved so much, how much vaster might
her power have grown, how much stronger through her example might popular
institutions throughout the world have become, and how much more pacific
the relations of European tribes, had nature been less niggard in her
gifts to the young commonwealth. On the sea she was strong, for the ocean
is the best of frontiers; but on land her natural boundaries faded
vaguely away, without strong physical demarcations and with no sharply
defined limits of tongue, history or race. Accident or human caprice
seemed to have divided German Highland from German Netherland; Belgic
Gaul from the rest of the Gallic realm. And even from the slender body,
which an arbitrary destiny had set off for centuries into a separate
organism, tyranny and religious bigotry had just hewn another portion
away. But the commonwealth was already too highly vitalized to permit
peaceful dismemberment. Only the low organisms can live in all their
parts after violent separations. The trunk remained, bleeding but alive
and vigor