nd comport themselves
patriotically. Language could not be devised to declare more plainly than
was done by this treaty that the central government of the League had
neither wish nor right to concern itself with the religious affairs of
the separate cities or provinces. If it permitted both Papists and
Protestants to associate themselves against the common foe, it could
hardly have been imagined, when the Articles were drawn, that it would
have claimed the exclusive right to define the minutest points in a
single Protestant creed.

And if the exclusively secular parts of the polity prevailing in the
country were clumsy, irregular, and even monstrous, and if its defects
had been flagrantly demonstrated by recent events, a more reasonable
method of reforming the laws might have been found than the imprisonment
of a man who had faithfully administered them forty years long.

A great commonwealth had grown out of a petty feudal organism, like an
oak from an acorn in a crevice, gnarled and distorted, though
wide-spreading and vigorous. It seemed perilous to deal radically with
such a polity, and an almost timid conservatism on the part of its
guardians in such an age of tempests might be pardonable.

Moreover, as before remarked, the apparent imbecility resulting from
confederacy and municipalism combined was for a season remedied by the
actual preponderance of Holland. Two-thirds of the total wealth and
strength of the seven republics being concentrated in one province, the
desired union seemed almost gained by the practical solution of all in
that single republic. But this was one great cause of the general
disaster.

It would be a thankless and tedious task to wander through the wilderness
of interrogatories and answers extending over three months of time, which
stood in the place of a trial. The defence of Barneveld was his own
history, and that I have attempted to give in the preceding pages. A
great part of the accusation was deduced from his private and official
correspondence, and it is for this reason that I have laid such copious
extracts from it before the reader. No man except the judges and the
States-General had access to those letters, and it was easy therefore, if
needful, to give them a false colouring. It is only very recently that
they have been seen at all, and they have never been published from that
day to this.

Out of the confused mass of documents appertaining to the trial, a few
generalization