d be taken. Report accordingly was made to the prisoner.
He had advised them to continue in their opposition to the National
Synod.

He had sought to calumniate and blacken his Excellency by saying that he
aspired to the sovereignty of the Provinces. He had received intelligence
on that subject from abroad in ciphered letters.

He had of his own accord rejected a certain proposed, notable alliance of
the utmost importance to this Republic.

[This refers, I think without doubt, to the conversation between
King James and Caron at the end of the year 1815.]

He had received from foreign potentates various large sums of money and
other presents.

All "these proceedings tended to put the city of Utrecht into a
blood-bath, and likewise to bring the whole country, and the person of
his Excellency into the uttermost danger."

This is the substance of the sentence, amplified by repetitions and
exasperating tautology into thirty or forty pages.

It will have been perceived by our analysis of Barneveld's answers to the
commissioners that all the graver charges which he was now said to have
confessed had been indignantly denied by him or triumphantly justified.

It will also be observed that he was condemned for no categorical
crime--lese-majesty, treason, or rebellion. The commissioners never
ventured to assert that the States-General were sovereign, or that the
central government had a right to prescribe a religious formulary for all
the United Provinces. They never dared to say that the prisoner had been
in communication with the enemy or had received bribes from him.

Of insinuation and implication there was much, of assertion very little,
of demonstration nothing whatever.

But supposing that all the charges had been admitted or proved, what
course would naturally be taken in consequence? How was a statesman who
adhered to the political, constitutional, and religious opinions on which
he had acted, with the general acquiescence, during a career of more than
forty years, but which were said to be no longer in accordance with
public opinion, to be dealt with? Would the commissioners request him to
retire honourably from the high functions which he had over and over
again offered to resign? Would they consider that, having fairly
impeached and found him guilty of disturbing the public peace by
continuing to act on his well-known legal theories, they might deprive
him summarily of power and declare him incapable o