saw that Article IV. really
contained both the East and West Indies. It hardly needed the secret
clause to make assurance doubly sure.

President Richardot was facetiously wont to observe that this point in
the treaty was so obscure that he did not understand it himself. But he
knew better. He understood it very well. The world understood it very
well. The United Provinces had throughout the negotiations ridiculde the
idea of being excluded from any part of the old world or, the new by
reason of the Borgian grant. All the commissioners knew that the war
would be renewed if any attempt were to be seriously made to put up those
famous railings around the ocean, of which the Dutch diplomatists spoke
in such bitter scorn. The Spanish plenipotentiaries, therefore, had
insisted that the word itself should be left out, and that the republic
should be forbidden access to territories subject to the crown of Spain.
So the Hollanders were thenceforth to deal directly with the kings of
Sumatra and the Moluccas, and the republics of Banda, and all the rich
commonwealths and principalities of nutmegs; cloves, and indigo, unless,
as grew every day more improbable, the Spaniards and Portuguese could
exclude them from that traffic by main force. And the Orange flag of the
republic was to float with equal facility over all America, from the Isle
of Manhattan to the shores of Brazil and the Straits of Magellan,
provided Philip had not ships and soldiers to vindicate with the sword
that sovereignty which Spanish swords and Spanish genius had once
acquired.

As for the Catholic worship, the future was to prove that liberty for the
old religion and for all forms of religion was a blessing more surely to
flow from the enlightened public sentiment of a free people emerging out
of the most tremendous war for liberty ever waged, than from the
stipulations of a treaty with a foreign power.

It was characteristic enough of the parties engaged in the great
political drama that the republic now requested from France and Great
Britain a written recognition of its independence, and that both France
and England refused.

It was strange that the new commonwealth, in the very moment of extorting
her freedom from the ancient tyranny, should be so unconscious of her
strength as to think free papers from neutral powers a boon. As if the
sign-manual of James and Henry were a better guarantee than the trophies
of the Nassaus, of Heemskerk, of Matelieff,