hysical catastrophe could have
produced. The opposing cliffs which religious hatred had rent asunder,
and between which it seemed destined to flow for ever, seemed very close,
and yet eternally separated.

The great war had established the republic; and apparently doomed the
obedient Netherlands to perpetual servitude.

There were many details of minor importance to be settled between the
various governments involved in these great transactions; but this
history draws to its predestined close, and it is necessary to glide
rapidly over matters which rather belong to a later epoch than the one
now under consideration.

The treaty between the republic and the government of Great Britain,
according to which each was to assist the other in case of war with four
thousand troops and twenty ships of war, was confirmed in the treaty of
truce. The debt of the United Provinces to the Crown of England was
definitely reckoned at 8,184,080 florins, and it was settled by the truce
that 200,000 florins should be paid semi-annually, to begin with the year
1611, until the whole debt should be discharged.

The army establishment of the republic was fixed during the truce at
thirty thousand infantry and three thousand horse. This was a reduction
from the war footing of fifteen thousand men. Of the force retained, four
thousand were a French legion maintained by the king, two thousand other
French at the expense of the States, and distributed among other troops,
two thousand Scotch, three thousand English, three thousand Germans. The
rest were native Netherlanders, among whom, however, were very few
Hollanders and Zeelanders, from which races the navy, both public and
mercantile, was almost wholly supplied.

The revenue of the United Provinces was estimated at between seven and
eight millions of florins.

It is superfluous to call attention again to the wonderful smallness of
the means, the minuteness of the physical enginry, as compared with more
modern manifestations, especially in our own land and epoch, by which so
stupendous a result had been reached. In the midst of an age in which
regal and sacerdotal despotism had seemed as omnipotent and irreversible
as the elemental laws of the universe, the republic had been reproduced.
A commonwealth of sand-banks, lagoons, and meadows, less than fourteen
thousand square miles in extent, had done battle, for nearly half a
century, with the greatest of existing powers, a realm whose territo