that the principle of national, popular representation was but
imperfectly developed. The municipal deputies acted only under
instructions. Each city was a little independent state, suspicious not
only of the sovereign and nobles, but of its sister cities. This mutual
jealousy hastened the general humiliation now impending. The centre of
the system waging daily more powerful, it more easily unsphered these
feebler and mutually repulsive bodies.

Philip's first step, upon assuming the government, was to issue a
declaration, through the council of Holland, that the privileges and
constitutions, which he had sworn to as Ruward, or guardian, during the
period in which Jacqueline had still retained a nominal sovereignty, were
to be considered null and void, unless afterwards confirmed by him as
count. At a single blow he thus severed the whole knot of pledges, oaths
and other political complications, by which he had entangled himself
during his cautious advance to power. He was now untrammelled again. As
the conscience of the smooth usurper was, thenceforth, the measure of
provincial liberty, his subjects soon found it meted to them more
sparingly than they wished. From this point, then, through the Burgundian
period, and until the rise of the republic, the liberty of the
Netherlands, notwithstanding several brilliant but brief laminations,
occurring at irregular intervals, seemed to remain in almost perpetual
eclipse.

The material prosperity of the country had, however, vastly increased.
The fisheries of Holland had become of enormous importance. The invention
of the humble Beukelzoon of Biervliet, had expanded into a mine of
wealth. The fisheries, too, were most useful as a nursery of seamen, and
were already indicating Holland's future naval supremacy. The fishermen
were the militia of the ocean, their prowess attested in the war with the
Hanseatic cities, which the provinces of Holland and Zeland, in Philip's
name, but by their own unassisted exertions, carried on triumphantly at
this epoch. Then came into existence that race of cool and daring
mariners, who, in after times, were to make the Dutch name illustrious
throughout the world, the men, whose fierce descendants, the "beggars of
the sea," were to make the Spanish empire tremble, the men, whose later
successors swept the seas with brooms at the mast-head, and whose
ocean-battles with their equally fearless English brethren often lasted
four uninterrupted days a