son had been read in the same thickets by
the Nervii to Julius Caesar, by the Batavians to the legions of
Vespasian; and now a loftier and a purer flame than that which inspired
the national struggles against Rome glowed within the breasts of the
descendants of the same people, and inspired them with the strength which
comes, from religious enthusiasm. More experienced, more subtle, more
politic than Hermann; more devoted, more patient, more magnanimous than
Civilis, and equal to either in valor and determination, William of
Orange was a worthy embodiment of the Christian, national resistance of
the German race to a foreign tyranny. Alva had entered the Netherlands to
deal with them as with conquered provinces. He found that the conquest
was still to be made, and he left the land without having accomplished
it. Through the sea of blood, the Hollanders felt that they were passing
to the promised land. More royal soldiers fell during the seven months'
siege of Harlem than the rebels had lost in the defeat of Jemmingen, and
in the famous campaign of Brabant. At Alkmaar the rolling waves of
insolent conquest were stayed, and the tide then ebbed for ever.

The accomplished soldier struggled hopelessly, with the wild and
passionate hatred which his tyranny had provoked. Neither his legions nor
his consummate strategy availed him against an entirely desperate people.
As a military commander, therefore, he gained, upon the whole, no
additional laurels during his long administration of the Netherlands. Of
all the other attributes to be expected in a man appointed to deal with a
free country, in a state of incipient rebellion, he manifested a signal
deficiency. As a financier, he exhibited a wonderful ignorance of the
first principles of political economy. No man before, ever gravely
proposed to establish confiscation as a permanent source of revenue to
the state; yet the annual product from the escheated property of
slaughtered heretics was regularly relied upon, during his
administration, to replenish the King's treasury, and to support the war
of extermination against the King's subjects. Nor did statesman ever
before expect a vast income from the commerce of a nation devoted to
almost universal massacre. During the daily decimation of the people's
lives, he thought a daily decimation of their industry possible. His
persecutions swept the land of those industrious classes which had made
it the rich and prosperous commonwealth i