s, as they grew in strength, never claimed the right to
make the laws or to share in the government. As a matter of fact, they
did make the laws, and shared, beside, in most important functions of
sovereignty, in the treaty-making power, especially. Sometimes by
bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises, or good hard
blows they extorted their charters. Their codes, statutes, joyful
entrances, and other constitutions were dictated by the burghers and
sworn to by the monarch. They were concessions from above; privileges
private laws; fragments indeed of a larger liberty, but vastly, better
than the slavery for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead
of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and violent days, would
have yielded little nutriment; but they still rather sought to reconcile
themselves, by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which they had
invaded, than to overturn the system. Thus the cities, not regarding
themselves as representatives or aggregations of the people, became
fabulous personages, bodies without souls, corporations which had
acquired vitality and strength enough to assert their existence. As
persons, therefore--gigantic individualities--they wheeled into the
feudal ranks and assumed feudal powers and responsibilities. The city of
Dort; of Middelburg, of Ghent, of Louvain, was a living being, doing
fealty, claiming service, bowing to its lord, struggling with its equals,
trampling upon its slaves.

Thus, in these obscure provinces, as throughout Europe, in a thousand
remote and isolated corners, civilization builds itself up, synthetically
and slowly; yet at last, a whole is likely to get itself constructed.
Thus, impelled by great and conflicting forces, now obliquely, now
backward, now upward, yet, upon the whole, onward, the new Society moves
along its predestined orbit, gathering consistency and strength as it
goes. Society, civilization, perhaps, but hardly humanity. The people has
hardly begun to extricate itself from the clods in which it lies buried.
There are only nobles, priests, and, latterly, cities. In the northern
Netherlands, the degraded condition of the mass continued longest. Even
in Friesland, liberty, the dearest blessing of the ancient Frisians, had
been forfeited in a variety of ways. Slavery was both voluntary and
compulsory. Paupers sold themselves that they might escape starvation.
The timid sold themselves that they might escape vi