ry, it was destined to be
granted. The world had gained something in forty-three years. It had at
least begun to learn that the hangman is not the most appropriate teacher
of religion.

During the period of apparent chaos with which this history of the great
revolt has been occupied, there had in truth been a great reorganization,
a perfected new birth. The republic had once more appeared in the world.

Its main characteristics have been indicated in the course of the
narrative, for it was a polity which gradually unfolded itself out of the
decay and change of previous organisms.

It was, as it were, in their own despite and unwittingly that the United
Provinces became a republic at all.

In vain, after originally declaring their independence of the ancient
tyrant, had they attempted to annex themselves to France and to England.
The sovereignty had been spurned. The magnificent prize which France for
centuries since has so persistently coveted, and the attainment of which
has been a cardinal point of her perpetual policy--the Low Countries and
the banks of the Rhine--was deliberately laid at her feet, and as
deliberately refused.

It was the secret hope of the present monarch to repair the loss which
the kingdom had suffered through the imbecility of his two immediate
predecessors. But a great nation cannot with impunity permit itself to be
despotically governed for thirty years by lunatics. It was not for the
Bearnese, with all his valour, his wit, and his duplicity, to obtain the
prize which Charles IX. and Henry III. had thrown away. Yet to make
himself sovereign of the Netherlands was his guiding but most secret
thought during all the wearisome and tortuous negotiations which preceded
the truce; nor did he abandon the great hope with the signature of the
treaty of 1609.

Maurice of Nassau too was a formidable rival to Henry. The
stadholder-prince was no republican. He was a good patriot, a noble
soldier, an honest man. But his father had been offered the sovereignty
of Holland and Zeeland, and the pistol of Balthasar Gerard had alone, in
all human probability, prevented the great prince from becoming
constitutional monarch of all the Netherlands, Batavian and Belgic.

Maurice himself asserted that not only had he been offered a million of
dollars, and large estates besides in Germany, if he would leave the
provinces to their fate, but that the archdukes had offered, would he
join his fortunes with theirs, to