ing to
compass it by base artifice or by intrigue of any kind. It was very
natural that he should be restive under the dictatorship of the Advocate.
If a single burgher and lawyer could make himself despot of the
Netherlands, how much more reasonable that he--with the noblest blood of
Europe in his veins, whose direct ancestor three centuries before had
been emperor not only of those provinces, but of all Germany and half
Christendom besides, whose immortal father had under God been the creator
and saviour of the new commonwealth, had made sacrifices such as man
never made for a people, and had at last laid down his life in its
defence; who had himself fought daily from boyhood upwards in the great
cause, who had led national armies from victory to victory till he had
placed his country as a military school and a belligerent power foremost
among the nations, and had at last so exhausted and humbled the great
adversary and former tyrant that he had been glad of a truce while the
rebel chief would have preferred to continue the war--should aspire to
rule by hereditary right a land with which his name and his race were
indelibly associated by countless sacrifices and heroic achievements.

It was no crime in Maurice to desire the sovereignty. It was still less a
crime in Barneveld to believe that he desired it. There was no special
reason why the Prince should love the republican form of government
provided that an hereditary one could be legally substituted for it. He
had sworn allegiance to the statutes, customs, and privileges of each of
the provinces of which he had been elected stadholder, but there would
have been no treason on his part if the name and dignity of stadholder
should be changed by the States themselves for those of King or sovereign
Prince.

Yet it was a chief grievance against the Advocate on the part of the
Prince that Barneveld believed him capable of this ambition.

The Republic existed as a fact, but it had not long existed, nor had it
ever received a formal baptism. So undefined was its constitution, and so
conflicting were the various opinions in regard to it of eminent men,
that it would be difficult to say how high-treason could be committed
against it. Great lawyers of highest intellect and learning believed the
sovereign power to reside in the separate states, others found that
sovereignty in the city magistracies, while during a feverish period of
war and tumult the supreme function had wit