giveness of his
subjects if he had ever unwittingly omitted the performance of any of his
duties towards them. And here," continues the envoy, "he broke into a
weeping, whereunto, besides the dolefulness of the matter, I think, he
was moche provoked by seeing the whole company to do the lyke before;
there beyng in myne opinion not one man in the whole assemblie, stranger
or another, that dewring the time of a good piece of his oration poured
not out as abundantly teares, some more, some lesse. And yet he prayed
them to beare with his imperfections, proceeding of his sickly age, and
of the mentioning of so tender a matter as the departing from such a sort
of dere and loving subjects."

And yet what was the Emperor Charles to the inhabitants of the
Netherlands that they should weep for him? His conduct towards them
during his whole career had been one of unmitigated oppression. What to
them were all these forty voyages by sea and land, these journeyings back
and forth from Friesland to Tunis, from Madrid to Vienna. What was it to
them that the imperial shuttle was thus industriously flying to and fro?
The fabric wrought was but the daily growing grandeur and splendor of his
imperial house; the looms were kept moving at the expense of their
hardly-earned treasure, and the woof was often dyed red in the blood of
his bravest subjects. The interests of the Netherlands had never been
even a secondary consideration with their master. He had fulfilled no
duty towards them, he had committed the gravest crimes against them. He
had regarded them merely as a treasury upon which to draw; while the sums
which he extorted were spent upon ceaseless and senseless wars, which
were of no more interest to them than if they had been waged in another
planet. Of five millions of gold annually, which he derived from all his
realms, two millions came from these industrious and opulent provinces,
while but a half million came from Spain and another half from the
Indies. The mines of wealth which had been opened by the hand of industry
in that slender territory of ancient morass and thicket, contributed four
times as much income to the imperial exchequer as all the boasted wealth
of Mexico and Peru. Yet the artisans, the farmers and the merchants, by
whom these riches were produced, were consulted about as much in the
expenditure of the imposts upon their industry as were the savages of
America as to the distribution of the mineral treasures of the