ed less noxious by the
vastly increased strength of principles long dormant in the atmosphere.
Anna van der Hoven, buried alive in Brussels, simply because her
Calvinistic creed was a crime in the eyes of the monks who murdered her,
was the last victim to purely religious persecution. If there were one
day to be still a tragedy or two in the Netherlands it was inevitable
that theological hatred would be obliged to combine with political party
spirit in its most condensed form before any deadly effect could be
produced.

Thus the year 1609 is a memorable one in the world's history. It forms a
great landmark in human progress. It witnessed the recognition of a
republic, powerful in itself, and whose example was destined to be most
influential upon the career of two mighty commonwealths of the future.
The British empire, just expanding for wider flight than it had hitherto
essayed, and about to pass through a series of vast revolutions,
gathering strength of wing as it emerged from cloud after cloud; and the
American republic, whose frail and obscure beginnings at that very
instant of time scarcely attracted a passing attention from the
contemporaneous world--both these political organisms, to which so much
of mankind's future liberties had been entrusted, were deeply indebted to
the earlier self-governing commonwealth.

The Dutch republic was the first free nation to put a girdle of empire
around the earth. It had courage, enterprise, intelligence, perseverance,
faith in itself, the instinct of self-government and self-help, hatred of
tyranny, the disposition to domineer, aggressiveness, greediness,
inquisitiveness, insolence, the love of science, of liberty, and of
money--all this in unlimited extent. It had one great defect, it had no
country. Upon that meagre standing ground its hand had moved the world
with an impulse to be felt through all the ages, but there was not soil
enough in those fourteen thousand, square miles to form the metropolis of
the magnificent empire which the genius of liberty had created beyond the
seas.

That the political institutions bequeathed by the United States of the
seventeenth century have been vastly improved, both in theory and
practice, by the United States of the nineteenth, no American is likely
to gainsay. That the elder Republic showed us also what to avoid, and was
a living example of the perils besetting a Confederacy which dared not
become a Union, is a lesson which we might