of their rights by the strength of their arms."

This honest, straightforward cynicism, coming from the lips of one of the
most experienced diplomatists of Europe, was difficult to gainsay.
Speaking as one having authority, the president told the States-General
in full assembly, that there was no law in Christendom, as between
nations, but the good old fist-law, the code of brute force.

Two centuries and a half have rolled by since that oration was
pronounced, and the world has made immense progress in science during
that period. But there is still room for improvement in this regard in
the law of nations. Certainly there is now a little more reluctance to
come so nakedly before the world. But has the cause of modesty or
humanity gained very much by the decorous fig-leaves of modern diplomacy?

The president alluded also to the ungrounded fears that bribery and
corruption would be able to effect much, during the truce, towards the
reduction of the provinces under their repudiated sovereign. After all,
it was difficult to buy up a whole people. In a commonwealth, where the
People was sovereign, and the persons of the magistrates ever changing,
those little comfortable commercial operations could not be managed so
easily as in civilized realms like France and England. The old Leaguer
thought with pensive regret, no doubt, of the hard, but still profitable
bargains by which the Guises and Mayennes and Mercoeurs, and a few
hundred of their noble adherents, had been brought over to the cause of
the king. He sighed at the more recent memories of the Marquis de Rosny's
embassy in England, and his largess scattered broadcast among the great
English lords. It would be of little use he foresaw--although the
instructions of Henry were in his portfolio, giving him almost unlimited
powers to buy up everybody in the Netherlands that could be bought--to
attempt that kind of traffic on a large scale in the Netherlands.

Those republicans were greedy enough about the navigation to the East and
West Indies, and were very litigious about the claim of Spain to put up
railings around the Ocean as her private lake, but they were less keen
than were their more polished contemporaries for the trade in human
souls.

"When we consider," said Jeannin, "the constitution of your State, and
that to corrupt a few people among you does no good at all, because the,
frequent change of magistracies takes away the means of gaining over many
of them