that it might one day be succeeded by a
more active stage of popular disease. The tumults of the Netherlands were
long in ripening; when the final outbreak came it would have been more
philosophical to enquire, not why it had occurred, but how it could have
been so long postponed. During the reign of Charles, the sixteenth
century had been advancing steadily in strength as the once omnipotent
Emperor lapsed into decrepitude. That extraordinary century had not
dawned upon the earth only to increase the strength of absolutism and
superstition. The new world had not been discovered, the ancient world
reconquered, the printing-press perfected, only that the inquisition
might reign undisturbed over the fairest portions of the earth, and
chartered hypocrisy fatten upon its richest lands. It was impossible that
the most energetic and quick-witted people of Europe should not feel
sympathy with the great effort made by Christendom to shake off the
incubus which had so long paralyzed her hands and brain. In the
Netherlands, where the attachment to Rome had never been intense, where
in the old times, the Bishops of Utrecht had been rather Ghibelline than
Guelph, where all the earlier sects of dissenters--Waldenses, Lollards,
Hussites--had found numerous converts and thousands of martyrs, it was
inevitable that there should be a response from the popular heart to the
deeper agitation which now reached to the very core of Christendom. In
those provinces, so industrious and energetic, the disgust was likely to
be most easily awakened for a system under which so many friars battened
in luxury upon the toils of others, contributing nothing to the taxation,
nor to the military defence of the country, exercising no productive
avocation, except their trade in indulgences, and squandering in taverns
and brothels the annual sums derived from their traffic in licences to
commit murder, incest, and every other crime known to humanity.

The people were numerous, industrious, accustomed for centuries to a
state of comparative civil freedom, and to a lively foreign trade, by
which their minds were saved from the stagnation of bigotry. It was
natural that they should begin to generalize, and to pass from the
concrete images presented them in the Flemish monasteries to the abstract
character of Rome itself. The Flemish, above all their other qualities,
were a commercial nation. Commerce was the mother of their freedom, so
far as they had acquired i