CHAPTER XXII.
Struggle of the United Provinces against Philip of Spain--Progress of the Republic--Influence of Geographical position on the fate of the Netherlands--Contrast offered by America--Miserable state of the so--called "obedient" provinces--Prosperity of the Commonwealth--Its internal government--Tendency to provincialism--Quibbles of the English Members of the Council, Wilkes and Bodley--Exclusion of Olden-Barneveld from the State Council--Proposals of Philip for mediation with the United Provinces--The Provinces resolutely decline all proffers of intervention.
The United Provinces had now been engaged in unbroken civil war for a quarter of a century.

It is, however, inaccurate to designate this great struggle with tyranny as a civil war.

It was a war for independence, maintained by almost the whole population of the United Provinces against a foreigner, a despot, alien to their blood, ignorant of their language, a hater of their race, a scorner of their religion, a trampler upon their liberties, their laws, and institutions--a man who had publicly declared that he would rather the whole nation were exterminated than permitted to escape from subjection to the Church of Rome.

Liberty of speech, liberty of the press, liberty of thought on political, religious, and social questions existed within those Dutch pastures and Frisian swamps to a far greater degree than in any other part of the world at that day; than in very many regions of Christendom in our own time.

Personal slavery was unknown.