ts of Netherlanders to resent
the tyranny practised against their greatest man, and the obloquy thus
brought against a nation always devoted to their liberties and laws.

That the political system of the country was miserably defective was no
fault of Barneveld. He was bound by oath and duty to administer, not make
the laws. A handful of petty feudal sovereignties such as had once
covered the soil of Europe, a multitude of thriving cities which had
wrested or purchased a mass of liberties, customs, and laws from their
little tyrants, all subjected afterwards, without being blended together,
to a single foreign family, had at last one by one, or two by two, shaken
off that supremacy, and, resuming their ancient and as it were
decapitated individualities, had bound themselves by treaty in the midst
of a war to stand by each other, as if they were but one province, for
purposes of common defence against the common foe.

There had been no pretence of laying down a constitution, of enacting an
organic law. The day had not come for even the conception of a popular
constitution. The people had not been invented. It was not provinces
only, but cities, that had contracted with each other, according to the
very first words of the first Article of Union. Some of these cities,
like Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, were Catholic by overwhelming majority, and
had subsequently either fallen away from the confederacy or been
conquered.

And as if to make assurance doubly sure, the Articles of Union not only
reserved to each province all powers not absolutely essential for
carrying on the war in common, but by an express article (the 13th),
declared that Holland and Zealand should regulate the matter of religion
according to their own discretion, while the other provinces might
conform to the provisions of the "Religious Peace" which included mutual
protection for Catholics and Protestants--or take such other order as
seemed most conducive to the religious and secular rights of the
inhabitants. It was stipulated that no province should interfere with
another in such matters, and that every individual in them all should
remain free in his religion, no man being molested or examined on account
of his creed. A farther declaration in regard to this famous article was
made to the effect that no provinces or cities which held to the Roman
Catholic religion were to be excluded from the League of Union if they
were ready to conform to its conditions a