k me to
forget that?'

The Republicans of the Third Republic, bent on coercing France into a
'moral unity' of Atheism, are fast making both Catholics and Protestants
forget such things in the imminence of a new and common peril to the
liberties and the rights of both. The two daughters of M. Guizot, as is
well known, married two brothers, the heirs and representatives of the
great Protestant and Republican family of De Witt. One of these
brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, just re-elected a deputy for the Calvados,
was my host at Val Richer. The other, M. Cornelis de Witt, the namesake
of the statesman for whom his illustrious brother the Grand Pensionary
of Holland sacrificed his own life in a vain effort to save him from the
brutal fury of an ignorant and frantic multitude at the Hague, has just
been taken, in the full force of his energies and his great ability,
from the love of his friends and from the cause of liberty in France. As
a deputy and a member of the Government he took an active part in the
re-establishment of the finances and the public organisation of France
after the disasters of 1870-71. As a director of the great mines at
Auzin, and as Vice-President of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean
Railway Company, he was in close and constant touch with the working
classes of France and with the great material interests of a country
which he loved as his ancestors loved Holland. This is not the place in
which to speak of the personal gifts and graces which will keep the name
of M. Cornelis de Witt green in the memory of all who knew him. But of
his great qualities as a citizen, and of the judgment absolutely
unwarped by passion or by prejudice which gave weight to all his
political convictions, it is the place to speak. After a fair and
serious experiment, in which he took his part loyally, at founding in
France the 'Conservative Republic' of M. Thiers, he thought that outlook
for the future completely and hopelessly closed; and as it was neither
in the traditions of Netherlandish liberty nor in his own virile and
courageous temper to acquiesce in the domination of a political
oligarchy ready, like Carrier and the Jacobins of 1792, to 'make France
one vast cemetery rather than not regenerate it after their own minds!'
M. Cornelis de Witt looked about him calmly for a way of escape.

This way he found where the sagacious Netherlanders of the seventeenth
century found it after the hard-won liberties of Holland had be