berg
having read that letter should burn it. He had interfered with the
cashiering of the mercenaries at Utrecht. He had said that such
cashiering without the consent of the States of that province was an act
of force which would justify resistance by force.

Although those States had sent commissioners to concert measures with the
Prince for that purpose, he had advised them to conceal their
instructions until his own plan for the disbandment could be carried out.
At a secret meeting in the house of Tresel, clerk of the States-General,
between Grotius, Hoogerbeets, and other accomplices, it was decided that
this advice should be taken. Report accordingly was made to the prisoner.
He had advised them to continue in their opposition to the National
Synod.

He had sought to calumniate and blacken his Excellency by saying that he
aspired to the sovereignty of the Provinces. He had received intelligence
on that subject from abroad in ciphered letters.

He had of his own accord rejected a certain proposed, notable alliance of
the utmost importance to this Republic.

[This refers, I think without doubt, to the conversation between
King James and Caron at the end of the year 1815.]

He had received from foreign potentates various large sums of money and
other presents.

All "these proceedings tended to put the city of Utrecht into a
blood-bath, and likewise to bring the whole country, and the person of
his Excellency into the uttermost danger."

This is the substance of the sentence, amplified by repetitions and
exasperating tautology into thirty or forty pages.

It will have been perceived by our analysis of Barneveld's answers to the
commissioners that all the graver charges which he was now said to have
confessed had been indignantly denied by him or triumphantly justified.

It will also be observed that he was condemned for no categorical
crime--lese-majesty, treason, or rebellion. The commissioners never
ventured to assert that the States-General were sovereign, or that the
central government had a right to prescribe a religious formulary for all
the United Provinces. They never dared to say that the prisoner had been
in communication with the enemy or had received bribes from him.

Of insinuation and implication there was much, of assertion very little,
of demonstration nothing whatever.

But supposing that all the charges had been admitted or proved, what
course would naturally be taken in consequence