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authority and right of sovereignty to be transferred to a board of
commissioners like this before which he stood. If, for example, a general
union of France, England, and the States of the United Netherlands should
be formed (and the very words of the Act of Union contemplated such
possibility), what greater absurdity could there be than to suppose that
a college of administration created for the specific purposes of such
union would be competent to perform acts of sovereignty within each of
those countries in matters of justice, polity, and religion?

It was known to mankind, he said, that when negotiations were entered
into for bestowing the sovereignty of the Provinces on France and on
England, special and full powers were required from, and furnished by,
the States of each individual province.

Had the sovereignty been in the assembly of the States-General, they
might have transferred it of their own motion or kept it for themselves.

Even in the ordinary course of affairs the commissioners from each
province to the General Assembly always required a special power from
their constituents before deciding any matter of great importance.

In regard to the defence of the respective provinces and cities, he had
never heard it doubted, he said, that the states or the magistrates of
cities had full right to provide for it by arming a portion of their own
inhabitants or by enlisting paid troops. The sovereign counts of Holland
and bishops of Utrecht certainly possessed and exercised that right for
many hundred years, and by necessary tradition it passed to the states
succeeding to their ancient sovereignty. He then gave from the stores of
his memory innumerable instances in which soldiers had been enlisted by
provinces and cities all over the Netherlands from the time of the
abjuration of Spain down to that moment. Through the whole period of
independence in the time of Anjou, Matthias, Leicester, as well as under
the actual government, it had been the invariable custom thus to provide
both by land and sea and on the rivers against robbers, rebels, pirates,
mischief-makers, assailing thieves, domestic or foreign. It had been done
by the immortal William the Silent on many memorable occasions, and in
fact the custom was so notorious that soldiers so enlisted were known by
different and peculiar nicknames in the different provinces and towns.

That the central government had no right to meddle with religious matters
w