ate, in the discharge of his duty as minister of foreign affairs,
kept the leading envoys of the Republic privately informed of events
which were becoming day by day more dangerous to the public interests and
his own safety. If ever a perfectly quiet conscience was revealed in the
correspondence of a statesman, it was to be found in these letters.

Calmly writing to thank Caron for some very satisfactory English beer
which the Ambassador had been sending him from London, he proceeded to
speak again of the religious dissensions and their consequences. He sent
him the letter and remonstrance which he had felt himself obliged to
make, and which he had been urged by his ever warm and constant friend
the widow of William the Silent to make on the subject of "the seditious
libels, full of lies and calumnies got up by conspiracy against him."
These letters were never published, however, until years after he had
been in his grave.

"I know that you are displeased with the injustice done me," he said,
"but I see no improvement. People are determined to force through the
National Synod. The two last ones did much harm. This will do ten times
more, so intensely embittered are men's tempers against each other."
Again he deplored the King's departure from his letters of 1613, by
adherence to which almost all the troubles would have been spared.

It is curious too to observe the contrast between public opinion in Great
Britain, including its government, in regard to the constitution of the
United Provinces at that period of domestic dissensions and incipient
civil war and the general impressions manifested in the same nation two
centuries and a half later, on the outbreak of the slavery rebellion, as
to the constitution of the United States.

The States in arms against the general government on the other side of
the Atlantic were strangely but not disingenuously assumed to be
sovereign and independent, and many statesmen and a leading portion of
the public justified them in their attempt to shake off the central
government as if it were but a board of agency established by treaty and
terminable at pleasure of any one of among sovereigns and terminable at
pleasure of any one of them.

Yet even a superficial glance at the written constitution of the Republic
showed that its main object was to convert what had been a confederacy
into an Incorporation; and that the very essence of its renewed political
existence was an organic law la