t her
strength and improve her finances, now entirely exhausted. He believed,
on the other hand, that the people of the provinces, after they should
have once become accustomed to repose; would shrink from exchanging their
lucrative pursuits for war, and would prefer to fall back under the yoke
of Spain. During the truce they would object to the furnishing of
necessary contributions for garrison expenses, and the result would be
that the most important cities and strongholds, especially those on the
frontier, which were mainly inhabited by Catholics, would become
insecure. Being hostile to a Government which only controlled them by
force, they would with difficulty be kept in check by diminished
garrisons, unless they should obtain liberty of Catholic worship.

It is a dismal proof of the inability of a leading mind, after half a
century's war, to comprehend the true lesson of the war--that toleration
of the Roman religion seemed to Maurice an entirely inadmissible idea.
The prince could not rise to the height on which his illustrious father
had stood; and those about him, who encouraged him in his hostility to
Catholicism, denounced Barneveld and Arminius as no better than traitors
and atheists. In the eyes of the extreme party, the mighty war had been
waged, not to liberate human thought, but to enforce predestination; and
heretics to Calvinism were as offensive in their eyes as Jews and
Saracens had ever been to Torquemada.

The reasons were unanswerable for the refusal of the States to bind
themselves to a foreign sovereign in regard to the interior
administration of their commonwealth; but that diversity of religious
worship should be considered incompatible with the health of the young
republic--that the men who had so bravely fought the Spanish Inquisition
should now claim their own right of inquisition into the human
conscience--this was almost enough to create despair as to the
possibility of the world's progress. The seed of intellectual advancement
is slow in ripening, and it is almost invariably the case that the
generation which plants--often but half conscious of the mightiness of
its work--is not the generation which reaps the harvest. But all mankind
at last inherits what is sown in the blood and tears of a few. That
Government, whether regal or democratic, should dare to thrust itself
between man and his Maker--that the State, not with interfering in a
thousand superfluous ways with the freedom of indi