1688.

April.

was the character of the new assembly which was convened some months before the British revolution. The turbulent 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 awakened spirit of free discussion, banished from the hall of legislation, fled for refuge among the log houses and plantations that were sprinkled along the streams. The people ran to arms: general discontent threatened an insurrection. The governor, in a new country, without soldiers and without a citadel, was compelled to practise moderation. Tyranny was impossible; it had no powerful instruments. When the prerogative of the governor was at its height, he was still too feeble to oppress the colony. Virginia was always A LAND OF LIBERTY."

66

1667.

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. Some years before Philip's war, 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 XXII.

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; they also 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 which had survived the wreck 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.

1559.

The urgencies of war, the Reformation, perhaps 1517 to 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 deliberate purpose of subverting them, and found a willing coad

jutor in the prelates. During the middle age the church was the sole guardian of the people; and its political influence rested on gratitude towards the order which limited arbitrary power by invoking the truths of religion, and opened to plebeian ambition the highest distinctions. In the progress of society, the ward was become of age, and could protect its rights; the guardian had fulfilled its office, ard might now resign its supremacy. But the Roman hierarchy, rigidly asserting authority, refused to submit belief to the test of inquiry, and struggled to establish a spiritual despotism: the sovereigns of Europe, equally refusing to subject their administrations to discussion, aimed at absolute dominion in the state. A new political alliance was the consequence. The Catholic priesthood and the temporal sovereigns, during the middle age so often and so bitterly opposed, entered into a natural and necessary friendship. By increasing the number of bishops, who, in right of their office, had a voice in the states, Philip II., 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. We have witnessed the sanguinary character of the Spanish system at St. Augustine; we are now to trace the feudal liberties of the Netherlands to the Isle of Manhattan.

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 arbitrary 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 with1572. out representation. Just then, in April, 1572, a party of the fugitive "beggars" succeeded in gaining the harbor of Briel; 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."

1575.

1576.

1579.

1581.

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 twentyJuly 26. 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 mem

bers 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 senfowl, on the margin of the ocean. 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 centre 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