Flushing and Hempstead were equally resolute. The votes of the several towns were presented to the governor and council; they were censured as "scandalous, illegal, and seditious, alienating the peaceable from their duty and obedience," and, according to the established precedents of tyranny, were ordered to be publicly burnt before the town-house of New York.

It was easy to burn the votes which the yeomanry of Long Island had passed in their town-meetings. But, meantime, the forts were not put in order; the government of the duke of York was hated; and when, in the next war between England and the Netherlands, a small Dutch squadron, commanded by the gallant Evertsen, of Zealand, in July, 1673, approached Manhattan, the city surrendered within four hours; the people of New Jersey made no resistance; and the counties on the Delaware, recovering greater privileges than they had enjoyed, cheerfully followed the example. The Mohawk chiefs congratulated their brethren on the recovery of their colony. "We have always," said they, "been as one flesh. If the French come down from Canada, we will join with the Dutch nation, and live and die with them;" and the words of love were confirmed by a belt of wampum. New York was once more a province of the Netherlands.

The nation of merchants and manufacturers had just achieved its independence of Spain and given to the Protestant world the leading example of a federal republic, when its mariners took possession of the Hudson. The country was now reconquered, at a time when the provinces, single-handed, were again struggling for existence against yet more powerful antagonists. France, supported by the bishops of Munster and Cologne, had succeeded in involving England in a conspiracy for the political destruction of England's commercial rival. Charles II. had begun hostilities as a pirate; and Louis XIV. did not disguise the purpose of conquest. In 1673, with armies amounting to two hundred thousand men, to which the Netherlands could oppose only twenty thousand, the French monarch invaded the republic; and, within a month, it was exposed to the same desperate dangers which had been encountered a century be

66

fore; while the English fleet, hovering off the coast, endeavored to land English troops in the heart of the wealthiest of the provinces. The annals of the human race record but few instances where moral power has so successfully defied every disparity of force, and repelled desperate odds by invincible heroism. At sea, where greatly superior numbers were on the side of the allied fleets of France and England, the untiring courage of the Dutch would not consent to be defeated. On land, the dikes were broken up; the country drowned; the son of Grotius, suppressing anger at the ignominious proposals of the French, protracted negotiations till the rising waters could form a wide and impassable moat round the cities. At Groningen the whole population, without regard to sex, children even, labored on the fortifications; and fear was not permitted even to a woman. Arlington, one of the joint proprietaries of Virginia, advised William of Orange to seek advancement by yielding to England. "My country," replied the young man, trusts in me; I will not sacrifice it to my interests, but, if need be, die with it in the last ditch." The landing of British troops in Holland could be prevented only by three naval engagements. De Ruyter and the younger Tromp had been bitter enemies; the latter had been disgraced on the accusation of the former; political animosities had increased the feud. At the battle of Soulsbay, in June, 1673, where the Dutch with fifty-two ships of the line engaged an enemy with eighty, De Ruyter was successful in his first manoeuvres, while the extraordinary ardor of Tromp plunged headlong into dangers which he could not overcome; the frank and true-hearted De Ruyter checked himself in the career of victory, and turned to the relief of his rival. "Oh, there comes grandfather to the rescue," shouted Tromp, in an ecstasy; "I never will desert him so long as I breathe." The issue of the day was uncertain. In the second battle, the advantage was with the Dutch. About three weeks after the conquest of New Netherland, the last and most terrible conflict took place near the Helder. The enthusiasm of the Dutch mariners dared almost infinite deeds of valor; as the noise of the artillery boomed along the low coast of Holland, the churches on the shore were thronged

with suppliants, begging victory for the right cause and their country. The contest raged, and was exhausted, and was again renewed with unexampled fury. But victory was with De Ruyter and the younger Tromp. The British fleet retreated, and was pursued; the coasts of Holland were protected.

For more than a century no other naval combat was fought between Netherlands and England. The English parliament, condemning the war, refused supplies; Prussia and Austria were alarmed; Spain openly threatened; and Charles II., in 1674, consented to treaties. All conquests were to be restored; and Holland, which had been the first to claim the enfranchisement of the oceans, against its present interests established by compact the rights of neutral flags. In a work dedicated to all the princes and nations of Christendom, and addressed to the common intelligence of the civilized world, the admirable Grotius, contending that right and wrong are not the evanescent expressions of fluctuating opinions, but are endowed with an immortality of their own, had established the freedom of the seas on the imperishable foundation of public justice. Ideas once generated live forever. With the recognition of maritime liberty, Holland disappears from our history; when, after the lapse of more than a century, this principle comes into jeopardy, Holland, the mother of four of our states, will rise up as our ally, bequeathing to the new federal republic the defence of commercial freedom which she had vindicated against Spain, and for which we shall see her prosperity fall a victim to England.

At the final transfer of New Netherland to England, on the last day of October, 1674, after a military occupation of fifteen months by the Dutch, the brother of Charles II. resumed the possession of New York, and Carteret appeared once more as proprietary of the eastern moiety of New Jersey; but the banks of the Delaware were reserved for men who had learned the right principle of public law from the uneducated son of a poor Leicestershire weaver.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PEOPLE CALLED QUAKERS IN THE UNITED STATES.

THE nobler instincts of humanity are the same in every age and in every breast. The exalted hopes that have dignified former generations of men will be renewed as long as the race shall survive. A spiritual unity binds together the members of the human family; and every heart contains an incorruptible seed, capable of springing up and producing all that man can know of God and duty and the soul. An inward voice, uncreated by schools, independent of refinement, opens to the unlettered hind, not less than to the polished scholar, a sure pathway to immortal truth.

This is the faith of the people called QUAKERS. A moral principle is tested by the attempt to reduce it to practice.

The history of European civilization is the history of the gradual enfranchisement of classes of society. In every European code, the ages of feudal influence, of mercantile ambition, of the enfranchisement of the country people, appear distinctly in succession.

In the fourteenth century, the peasantry of England, conducted by tilers and carters and ploughmen, demanded of a youthful king deliverance from the bondage and burdens of feudal oppression; in the fifteenth, the last traces of villeinage were wiped away; in the sixteenth, the noblest ideas of human destiny, awakening in the common mind, became the central points round which plebeian sects were gathered; in the seventeenth, the men that turned the battle on Marston Moor were mechanics and yeomen and the sons of yeomen, fighting, as they believed, for their own cause.

Political liberties had been followed by the emancipation

of knowledge. The merchants always tolerated or favored the pursuits of science; Galileo would have been safe at Venice, and honored at Amsterdam or London. The method of free inquiry, applied to chemistry, had invented gunpowder, and changed the manners of the feudal aristocracy; applied to geography, had discovered a hemisphere, and, circumnavigating the globe, made the theatre of commerce wide as the world; applied to the mechanical process of multiplying books, had, in Protestant countries, brought the New Testament, in the vulgar tongue, within the reach of every class; applied to the rights of persons and property, had, for the English, built up a system of common law and given securities to liberty.

On the continent of Europe, Descartes had already applied the method of observation and free inquiry to the study of morals and the mind; in England, Bacon hardly proceeded beyond the bounds of natural philosophy. Freedom, as applied to morals, was cherished in England among the people, and therefore had its development in religion. At the Ref ormation, the inferior clergy, rising against Rome and against domestic tyranny, had a common faith and common political cause with the people. A body of the yeomanry, becoming Independents, planted Plymouth colony. A part of the gentry espoused Calvinism, and fled to Massachusetts. The popular movement of intellectual liberty was measured by advances toward the liberty of preaching and the liberty of conscience.

The moment was arrived for the plebeian mind to escape from hereditary prejudices; when the inquisitiveness of Bacon, the enthusiasm of Wycliffe, and the politics of Wat Tyler, were to gain the highest unity in a sect; when a popular, and, therefore, in that age, a religious party, building upon a divine principle, should demand freedom of thought, purity of morals, and universal enfranchisement.

The sect had its birth in a period when in England reform was invading the church, subverting the throne, and repealing the privileges of feudalism; when Presbyterians were quarrelling with Anabaptists and Independents, and all the three with the Roman Catholics and the English church,