of rural life, could never be repressed. In the assembly of April, 1688, the spirit of the burgesses was greater than ever, and an immediate dissolution of the body seemed to the council the only mode of counteracting their influence. But the governor, in a new country, without soldiers and without a citadel, was compelled to practice moderation. Tyranny was impossible; for it had no powerful instruments. When the prerogative was at its height, it was still too feeble to subdue the colony. Virginia was always "A LAND OF LIBERTY."

Nor let the first tendencies to union pass unnoticed. In the bay of the Chesapeake, Smith had encountered warriors of the Five Nations; and others had fearlessly roamed to the shores of Massachusetts bay, and even invaded the soil of Maine. In 1667 the Mohawks committed ravages near Northampton, on Connecticut river; and the general court of Massachusetts addressed them a letter: "We never yet did any wrong to you, or any of yours," such was the language of the Puritan diplomatists, "neither will we take any from you, but will right our people according to justice." In 1677 Maryland invited Virginia to join with itself and with New York in a treaty of peace with the Seneca Indians, and in the month of August a conference was held with that tribe at Albany. In July, 1684, the governor of Virginia and of New York, and the agent of Massachusetts, met the sachems of the Five Nations at Albany, to strengthen and burnish the covenant-chain, and plant the tree of peace, of which the top should reach the sun, and the branches shelter the wide land. The treaty extended from the St. Croix to Albemarle. New York was the bond of New England and Virginia. The north and the south were united by the acquisition of NEW NETHERLAND.

CHAPTER XII.

NEW NETHERLAND.

THE spirit of the age was present when the foundations of New York were laid. Every great European event affected the fortunes of America. Did a state prosper, it sought an increase of wealth by plantations in the west. Was a sect persecuted, it escaped to the New World. The Reformation, followed by collisions between English dissenters and the Anglican hierarchy, colonized New England; the Reformation, emancipating the Low Countries, led to settlements on the Hudson. The Netherlands divide with England the glory of having planted the first colonies in the United States; and they divide the glory of having set the example of public freedom. If England gave our fathers the idea of a popular representation, the United Provinces were their model of a federal union.

At the discovery of America, the Netherlands possessed the municipal institutions of the Roman world and the feudal liberties of the middle ages. The landed aristocracy, the hierarchy, and the municipalities exercised political franchises. The municipal officers, in part appointed by the sovereign, in part perpetuating themselves, had common interests with the industrious citizens, from whom they were selected; and the nobles, cherishing the feudal right of resisting arbitrary taxation, joined the citizens in defending national liberty against encroachments.

The urgencies of war, the Reformation, perhaps also the arrogance of power, often tempted Charles V. to violate the constitutions of the Netherlands. Philip II., on his accession in 1559, formed the purpose of subverting them, and found

coadjutors in the prelates. By increasing the number of bishops, who, in right of their office, had a voice in the states, he, in 1559, destroyed the balance of the constitution.

Thus the power of the sovereign sought to crush inherited privileges. Patriotism and hope animated the provinces; despotism and bigotry were on the side of Philip.

The contest in the Low Countries was one of the most memorable in the history of the human race. All classes were roused to opposition. The nobles framed a solemn petition; the common people broke in pieces the images that filled the churches. Despotism then seized possession of the courts, and invested a commission with absolute power over life and property; to overawe the burghers, the citadels were filled with mercenary soldiers; to strike terror into the nobility, Egmont and Horn were executed. Men fled; but whither? The village, the city, the court, the camp, were held by the tyrant; the fugitive had no asylum but the

ocean.

The establishment of subservient courts was followed by arbitrary taxation. But feudal liberty forbade taxation except by consent; and the levying of the tenth penny excited more commotion than the tribunal of blood. Merchant and landholder, citizen and peasant, Catholic and Protestant, were ripe for insurrection; and even with foreign troops Alba vainly attempted to enforce taxation without representation. Just then, on the first of April, 1572, a party of the fugitive "beggars" succeeded in gaining the harbor of Briel, the key of the North Provinces; and, in July of the same year, the states of Holland, creating the Prince of Orange their stadholder, prepared to levy money and troops. In 1575 Zealand joined with Holland in demanding for freedom some better safeguard than the word of Philip II., and in November of the following year nearly all the provinces united to drive. foreign troops from their soil. "The spirit that animates them," said Sidney to Queen Elizabeth, "is the spirit of God, and is invincible."

The particular union of five northern provinces at Utrecht, in January, 1579, perfected the insurrection by forming the basis of a sovereignty; and, when their ablest chiefs were put

under the ban, and a price offered for the assassination of the Prince of Orange, the deputies in the assembly at the Hague, on the twenty-sixth of July, 1581, making few changes in their ancient laws, declared their independence by abjuring their king. "The prince," said they, in their manifesto, "is made for the subjects, without whom there would be no prince; and if, instead of protecting them, he seeks to take from them their old freedom and use them as slaves, he must be holden not a prince, but a tyrant, and may justly be deposed by the authority of the state." A rude structure of a commonwealth was the unpremeditated result of the revolution.

The republic of the United Netherlands was by its origin and its nature commercial. The device on an early Dutch coin was a ship laboring on the billows without oar or sails. The rendezvous of its martyrs had been the sea; the muster of its patriot emigrants had been on shipboard; and they had hunted their enemy, as the whale-ships pursue their game, in every corner of the ocean. The two leading members of the confederacy, from their situation, could seek subsistence only on the water. Holland is but a peninsula, intersected by navigable rivers; protruding itself into the sea; crowded with a dense population on a soil saved from the deep by embankments, and kept dry only with pumps driven by windmills. Its houses were rather in the water than on land.

And Zealand is composed of islands. Its inhabitants were nearly all fishermen; its villages were as nests of sea-fowl. In both provinces every house was by nature a nursery of sailors; the sport of children was among the breakers; their boyish pastimes in boats; and, if their first excursions were but voyages to some neighboring port, they soon braved the dangers of every sea. The states advanced to sudden opulence; before the insurrection, they could with difficulty keep their embankments in repair; and now they were able to support large fleets and armies. Their commerce gathered into their harbors the fruits of the wide world. Producing almost no grain of any kind, Holland had the best-supplied granary of Europe; without fields of flax, it swarmed with weavers of linen; destitute of flocks, it became the centre of all woollen manufactures; and provinces which had not a forest built more ships than all

Europe besides. They connected hemispheres. Their enterprising mariners displayed the flag of the republic from Southern Africa to the arctic circle. The ships of the Dutch, said Raleigh, outnumber those of England and ten other kingdoms. To the Italian cardinal the number seemed infinite. Amsterdam was the seat of the commerce of Europe. The sea not only bathed its walls, but flowed through its streets; and its merchantmen lay so crowded together that the beholder from the ramparts could not look through the thick forests of masts and yards. War for liberty became unexpectedly a well-spring of opulence; Holland plundered the commerce of Spain by its maritime force, and supplanted its rivals in the gainful traffic with the Indies. Lisbon and Antwerp were despoiled; Amsterdam, the depot of the merchandise of Europe and of the east, was become beyond dispute the first commercial city of the world; the Tyre of modern times; the Venice of the north; the queen of all the seas.

In 1581, the year after Portugal had been forcibly annexed to Spain and the Portuguese settlements in Asia were become for a season Spanish provinces, the epoch of the independence of the Netherlands, Thomas Buts, an Englishman who had five times crossed the Atlantic, offered to the states to conduct four ships-of-war to America. The adventure was declined by the government; but no obstacles were offered to private enterprise. Ten years afterward, William Usselinx, who had lived some years in Castile, Portugal, and the Azores, proposed a West India company; but the dangers of the undertaking were still too appalling.

In 1594 the port of Lisbon was closed by the king of Spain against the Low Countries. Their carrying trade in Indian goods was lost, unless their ships could penetrate to the seas of Asia. A company of merchants, believing that the coast of Siberia fell away to the southeast, hoped to shorten the voyage at least eight thousand miles by using a northeastern route. A double expedition was sent forth on discovery; two fly-boats vainly tried to pass through the Straits of Veigatz, while, in a large ship, William Barentsen, whom Grotius honored as the peer of Columbus, coasted Nova Zembla to the seventy-seventh degree, without finding a passage.