. A state,
single towards the rest of the world, a unit in its external relations,
while permitting internally a variety of sovereignties and
institutions--in many respects the prototype of our own much more
extensive and powerful union--was destined to spring from the act thus
signed by the envoys of five provinces. Those envoys were acting,
however, under the pressure of extreme necessity, and for what was
believed an evanescent purpose. The future confederacy was not to
resemble the system of the German empire, for it was to acknowledge no
single head. It was to differ from the Achaian league, in the far
inferior amount of power which it permitted to its general assembly, and
in the consequently greater proportion of sovereign attributes which were
retained by the individual states. It was, on the other hand, to furnish
a closer and more intimate bond than that of the Swiss confederacy, which
was only a union for defence and external purposes, of cantons otherwise
independent. It was, finally, to differ from the American federal
commonwealth in the great feature that it was to be merely a confederacy
of sovereignties, not a representative Republic. Its foundation was a
compact, not a constitution. The contracting parties were states and
corporations, who considered themselves as representing small
nationalities 'dejure et de facto', and as succeeding to the supreme
power at the very instant in which allegiance to the Spanish monarch was
renounced. The general assembly was a collection of diplomatic envoys,
bound by instructions from independent states. The voting was not by
heads, but by states. The deputies were not representatives of the
people, but of the states; for the people of the United States of the
Netherlands never assembled--as did the people of the United States of
America two centuries later--to lay down a constitution, by which they
granted a generous amount of power to the union, while they reserved
enough of sovereign attributes to secure that local self-government which
is the life-blood of liberty.

The Union of Utrecht; narrowed as it was to the nether portion of that
country which, as a whole, might have formed a commonwealth so much more
powerful, was in origin a proof of this lamentable want of patriotism.
Could the jealousy of great nobles, the rancour of religious differences,
the Catholic bigotry of the Walloon population, on the one side,
contending with the democratic insanity of the Ghent