That Holland, the sandy, marshy
country that the ancients considered all but uninhabitable, now sends
out yearly from her confines agricultural products to the value of a
hundred millions of francs, possesses about one million three hundred
thousand head of cattle, and, in proportion to the extent of her
territory, may be accounted one of the most populous of European
states.
But however wonderful may be the physical history of Holland, her
political history is still more so. This small territory invaded from
the beginning by different tribes of the Germanic races, subjugated by
the Romans and the Franks, devastated by the Normans and by the Danes,
desolated by centuries of civil war with all its horrors, this small
people of fisherman and traders, saves its civil liberty and its
freedom of conscience by a war of eighty years against the formidable
monarchy of Philip II., and founds a republic which becomes the ark of
salvation to the liberties of all the world, the adopted country of
science, the Exchange of Europe, the station for the commerce of the
world; a republic which extends its domination to Java, Sumatra,
Hindustan, Ceylon, New Holland, Japan, Brazil, Guiana, the Cape of
Good Hope, the West-Indies, and New York; a republic which vanquished
England on the sea, which resists the united arms of Charles II.
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