form
after their renunciation of their Spanish sovereign, not because the
people, or the States as representing the people, had deliberately chosen
a republican system, but because they could get no powerful monarch to
accept the sovereignty. They had offered to become subjects of Protestant
England and of Catholic France. Both powers had refused the offer, and
refused it with something like contumely. However deep the subsequent
regret on the part of both, there was no doubt of the fact. But the
internal policy in all the provinces, and in all the towns, was
republican. Local self-government existed everywhere. Each city
magistracy was a little republic in itself. The death of William the
Silent, before he had been invested with the sovereign power of all seven
provinces, again left that sovereignty in abeyance. Was the supreme power
of the Union, created at Utrecht in 1579, vested in the States-General?

They were beginning theoretically to claim it, but Barneveld denied the
existence of any such power either in law or fact. It was a league of
sovereignties, he maintained; a confederacy of seven independent states,
united for certain purposes by a treaty made some thirty years before.
Nothing could be more imbecile, judging by the light of subsequent events
and the experience of centuries, than such an organization. The
independent and sovereign republic of Zealand or of Groningen, for
example, would have made a poor figure campaigning, or negotiating, or
exhibiting itself on its own account before the world. Yet it was
difficult to show any charter, precedent, or prescription for the
sovereignty of the States-General. Necessary as such an incorporation was
for the very existence of the Union, no constitutional union had ever
been enacted. Practically the Province of Holland, representing more than
half the population, wealth, strength, and intellect of the whole
confederation, had achieved an irregular supremacy in the States-General.
But its undeniable superiority was now causing a rank growth of envy,
hatred, and jealousy throughout the country, and the great Advocate of
Holland, who was identified with the province, and had so long wielded
its power, was beginning to reap the full harvest of that malice.

Thus while there was so much of vagueness in theory and practice as to
the sovereignty, there was nothing criminal on the part of Maurice if he
was ambitious of obtaining the sovereignty himself. He was not seek