en
prostrated by the mad revolt of a misled multitude against the
Government of the Grand Pensionary, who had held his own against
Cromwell and against Louis XIV., made Holland the first naval power of
the world, and scared London with the thunder of the Dutch cannon in the
Thames. Nothing but the restoration of the hereditary principle in the
person of William of Orange saved Amsterdam and Rotterdam from falling
at the end of the seventeenth century, as they fell at the end of the
eighteenth, under the dominion of an invader. When the hereditary
principle was again abandoned after the death of William of Orange, the
domestic peace as well as the national prestige of Holland vanished with
it, and though the Dutch people in the middle of the eighteenth century
insisted upon seeing it for a time restored, the power of the Dutch
Executive towards the end of the century was so much hampered and
weakened by the local jealousies of the provinces, that in the
Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, Mr.
Butler, who had travelled much in the Low Countries, successfully
enforced the necessity of making the American Executive monarchical by a
vivid description of the evils inflicted upon Holland by her departures
from that principle. We took warning as to the perils of the Union from
the example of the Low Countries, and as to the importance of the
Executive from the example of Great Britain. There were many Americans
indeed in 1788, men of worth and of weight both in private and in public
affairs, who rather than accept Edmund Randolph's plan of confiding the
Executive authority to a triumvirate, would have given their adhesion to
the seriously mooted project of making the American Executive absolutely
hereditary, and inviting the Prince-Bishop of Osnaburg to accept the
office.

The convictions of M. Cornelis de Witt are represented now with equal
energy and determination in Normandy by his brother, M. Conrad de Witt,
and by his son, M. Pierre de Witt, just elected a Councillor-General of
the Calvados, and in Languedoc by his brother-in-law, M. Guillaume
Guizot, and by his son, M. Cornelis Henri de Witt.

The home of M. Cornelis Henri de Witt, near Tonneins, in the
Lot-et-Garonne, stands in the heart of a land of fruits and vines. From
the terrace of his chateau of Peyreguilhot, the eye ranges over a fine
expanse of the valley of the Garonne, which at no great distance from
Tonneins mingles with the Lot b