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Ministers, generals, and every other species of functionary, with swarms of minor tyrants, while treating the country as a conquered province, deprived it of all share in the brilliant though checkered glories gained by that to which it was subservient. The Dutch were robbed of national independence and personal freedom.
Thus Michelet: "The great streams of the Netherlands, tired with their very long course, perish as though from weariness in the unfeeling ocean." Elsewhere, the great folio begets the octavo, "which becomes the parent of the small volume, of booklets, of ephemeral pamphlets, invisible spirits flying in the night, creating under the very eyes of tyrants the circulation of liberty."
In truth, the act of bringing kings to public condign punishment was no such new thing in the chronicles of Scotland, as that brave historian, George Buchanan, plainly shows, to have filled us with such amazement and affright, had the offences of King Charles been proven as clearly personal, as the crimes for which the ancient tyrants of his pedigree suffered the death; but his offences were shared with his counsellors, whose duty it was to have bridled his arbitrary pretensions.
Those sectaries had no scruple about smiting tyrants with the sword of Gideon. Many of them did not shrink from using the dagger of Ehud. They were probably even now meditating another Western insurrection, or another Rye House Plot. James, therefore, conceived that he might safely persecute the Church if he could only gain the Dissenters.
The efforts of tyrants will be directed to our institutions. It will be their aim to break us down. Must not we prevent this event peaceably if we can forcibly if we must? No power will prevail with tyrants and usurpers but the power of gunpowder or steel.
They are wicked, but not equally so with you. They are treacherous, because they are under no obligation to speak truth to their tyrants. They acknowledge the superiority of our understanding, because we have abused their ignorance. They allow the justice of our authority, because we have abused their weakness." "But these Negros, it is further urged, were born slaves.
The Netherlanders were, on the whole, a law-abiding people, preferring to conduct even a revolution according to precedent, very much attached to ancient usages and traditions, valuing the liberties, as they called them, which they had wrested from what had been superior force, with their own right hands, preferring facts to theories, and feeling competent to deal with tyrants in the concrete rather than to annihilate tyranny in the abstract by a bold and generalizing phraseology.
It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants.
All reaction ceased; and the people were reduced to exist in one huge, unintelligent, monotonous substance, united by the interfusion of a vile superstition, which permitted just enough mental life in the mass to leave it capable of being actuated to all the purposes of cheats, and tyrants, a proper subject for the dominion of "our Lord God the Pope," as he was sometimes denominated; and might have been denominated without exciting indignation, in the hearing of millions of beings bearing the form of men and the name of Christians.
They did not overthrow their ruling dynasty, their tyrants. The tyrants fled, and the people were not angry, nor sorry, nor fierce, nor glad. They were stupefied. Members of the old order joined hands with those of the people's parties, out to evolve a republic with new ideals based upon the people's will and inspired by the people's passion.
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