e to time in the course of
the ages, sets up for the trial of its oppressors, and which is called
Revolution, it is the more important for the great interests of humanity
that before the judgment-seat of History a crown should be no protection
to its wearer. There is no plea to the jurisdiction of history, if
history be true to itself.

As for the royal criminal called Philip II., his life is his arraignment,
and these volumes will have been written in vain if a specification is
now required.

Homicide such as was hardly ever compassed before by one human being was
committed by Philip when in the famous edict of 1568 he sentenced every
man, woman, and child in the Netherlands to death. That the whole of this
population, three millions or more, were not positively destroyed was
because no human energy could suffice to execute the diabolical decree.
But Alva, toiling hard, accomplished much of this murderous work. By the
aid of the "Council of Blood," and of the sheriffs and executioners of
the Holy Inquisition, he was able sometimes to put eight hundred human
beings to death in a single week for the crimes of Protestantism or of
opulence, and at the end of half a dozen years he could boast of having
strangled, drowned, burned, or beheaded somewhat more than eighteen
thousand of his fellow-creatures. These were some of the non-combatant
victims; for of the tens of thousands who perished during his
administration alone, in siege and battle, no statistical record has been
preserved.

In face of such wholesale crimes, of these forty years of bloodshed, it
is superfluous to refer to such isolated misdeeds as his repeated
attempts to procure the assassination of the Prince of Orange, crowned at
last by the success of Balthazar Gerard, nor to his persistent efforts to
poison the Queen of England; for the enunciation of all these murders or
attempts at murder would require a repetition of the story which it has
been one of the main purposes of these volumes to recite.

For indeed it seems like mere railing to specify his crimes. Their very
magnitude and unbroken continuity, together with their impunity, give
them almost the appearance of inevitable phenomena. The horrible monotony
of his career stupefies the mind until it is ready to accept the
principle of evil as the fundamental law of the world.

His robberies, like his murders, were colossal. The vast, system of
confiscation set up in the Netherlands was sufficient to r