soldiers.
Should his Excellency make difficulty in this, the commissioners were
instructed to declare to him that they were ordered to warn the colonels
and captains standing in the payment of Holland, by letter and word of
mouth, that they were bound by oath to obey the States of Holland as
their paymasters and likewise to carry out the orders of the provincial
and municipal magistrates in the places where they were employed. The
soldiery was not to act or permit anything to be done against those
resolutions, but help to carry them out, his Excellency himself and the
troops paid by the States of Holland being indisputably bound by oath and
duty so to do."

Doubtless a more convenient arrangement from a military point of view
might be imagined than a system of quotas by which each province in a
confederacy claimed allegiance and exacted obedience from the troops paid
by itself in what was after all a general army. Still this was the
logical and inevitable result of State rights pushed to the extreme and
indeed had been the indisputable theory and practice in the Netherlands
ever since their revolt from Spain. To pretend that the proceedings and
the oath were new because they were embarrassing was absurd. It was only
because the dominant party saw the extreme inconvenience of the system,
now that it was turned against itself, that individuals contemptuous of
law and ignorant of history denounced it as a novelty.

But the strong and beneficent principle that lay at the bottom of the
Advocate's conduct was his unflagging resolve to maintain the civil
authority over the military in time of peace. What liberal or healthy
government would be possible otherwise? Exactly as he opposed the
subjection of the magistracy by the priesthood or the mob, so he now
defended it against the power of the sword. There was no justification
whatever for a claim on the part of Maurice to exact obedience from all
the armies of the Republic, especially in time of peace. He was himself
by oath sworn to obey the States of Holland, of Utrecht, and of the three
other provinces of which he was governor. He was not commander-in-chief.
In two of the seven provinces he had no functions whatever, military or
civil. They had another governor.

Yet the exposition of the law, as it stood, by the Advocate and his claim
that both troops and Stadholder should be held to their oaths was
accounted a crime. He had invented a new oath--it was said--and sought t