woman, not predestined from all time for salvation, could possibly find
the way to heaven, language becomes powerless to stigmatize his
depravity. Whatever the punishment impending over his head in this world
or the next, it is certain that the cause of human freedom was not
destined on the whole to lose ground through the life-work of Barneveld.

A champion of liberties rather than of liberty, he defended his
fatherland with heart and soul against the stranger; yet the government
of that fatherland was, in his judgments to be transferred from the hand
of the foreigner, not to the self-governing people, but to the provincial
corporations. For the People he had no respect, and perhaps little
affection. He often spoke of popular rights with contempt. Of popular
sovereignty he had no conception. His patriotism, like his ambition, was
provincial. Yet his perceptions as to eternal necessity in all healthy
governments taught him that comprehensible relations between the state
and the population were needful to the very existence of a free
commonwealth. The United Provinces, he maintained, were not a republic,
but a league of seven provinces very loosely hung together, a mere
provisional organization for which it was not then possible to substitute
anything better. He expressed this opinion with deep regret, just as the
war of independence was closing, and added his conviction that, without
some well-ordered government, no republic could stand.

Yet, as time wore on, the Advocate was destined to acquiesce more and
more in this defective constitution. A settled theory there was none, and
it would have been difficult legally and historically to establish the
central sovereignty of the States-General as matter of right.

Thus Barneveld, who was anything but a democrat, became, almost
unwittingly, the champion of the least venerable or imposing of all forms
of aristocracy--an oligarchy of traders who imagined themselves
patricians. Corporate rights, not popular liberty, seemed, in his view,
the precious gains made by such a prodigious expenditure of time, money,
and blood. Although such acquisitions were practically a vast addition to
the stock of human freedom then existing in the world, yet torrents of
blood and millions of treasure were to be wasted in the coming centuries
before mankind was to convince itself that a republic is only to be made
powerful and perpetual by placing itself upon the basis of popular right
rather t