e. When they should give
up Grave, Hoogstraaten was to be restored to them if still in possession
of the States and they were to enter into no negotiations with the
archduke except with full knowledge of the stadholder.

There were no further military, operations of moment during the rest of
the year.

Much, more important, however, than siege, battle, or mutiny, to human
civilization, were the steady movements of the Dutch skippers and
merchants at this period. The ears of Europe were stunned with the
clatter of destruction going on all over Christendom, and seeming the
only reasonable occupation of Christians; but the little republic; while
fighting so heroically against the concentrated powers of despotism in
the West, was most industriously building up a great empire in the East.
In the new era just dawning, production was to become almost as
honourable and potent, a principle as destruction.

The voyages among the spicy regions of the equator--so recently wrested
from their Catholic and Faithful Majesties by Dutch citizens who did not
believe in Borgia--and the little treaties made with petty princes and
commonwealths, who for the first time ware learning that there were other
white men in the world beside the Portuguese, had already led to
considerable results. Before the close of, the previous year that great
commercial corporation had been founded--an empire within an empire; a
republic beneath a republic--a counting-house company which was to
organize armies, conquer kingdoms, build forts and cities, make war and
peace, disseminate and exchange among the nations of the earth the
various products of civilization, more perfectly than any agency hitherto
known, and bring the farthest disjoined branches of the human family into
closer, connection than had ever existed before. That it was a monopoly,
offensive to true commercial principles, illiberal, unjust, tyrannical;
ignorant of the very rudiments of mercantile philosophy; is plain enough.
For the sages of the world were but as clowns, at that period, in
economic science.

Was not the great financier of the age; Maximilian de Bethune, at that
very moment exhausting his intellect in devices for the prevention of all
international commerce even in Europe? "The kingdom of France," he
groaned, "is stuffed full of the manufactures of our neighbours, and it
is incredible what a curse to us are these wares. The import of all
foreign goods has now been forbidden und