one. The republic would acquire, in reality, the grandeur which with
Spain was but an empty boast, would have the glory of transferring the
great war beyond the limits of home into those far distant possessions,
where the enemy deemed himself most secure, and would teach the true
religion to savages sunk in their own superstitions, and still further
depraved by the imported idolatries of Rome. Commerce was now world-
wide, and the time had come for the Netherlanders, to whom the ocean
belonged, to tear out from the pompous list of the Catholic king's titles
his appellation of Lord of the Seas.

There were others, however, whose language was not so sanguine. They
spoke with a shiver of the inhabitants of America, who hated all men,
simply because they were men, or who had never manifested any love for
their species except as an article of food. To convert such cannibals to
Christianity and Calvinism would be a hopeless endeavour, and meanwhile
the Spaniards were masters of the country. The attempt to blockade half
the globe with forty galleots was insane; for, although the enemy had not
occupied the whole territory, he commanded every harbour and position of
vantage. Men, scarcely able to defend inch by inch the meagre little
sandbanks of their fatherland, who should now go forth in hopes to
conquer the world, were but walking in their sleep. They would awake to
the consciousness of ruin.

Thus men in the United Provinces spake of America. Especially Barneveld
had been supposed to be prominent among the opponents of the new Company,
on the ground that the more violently commercial ambition excited itself
towards wider and wilder fields of adventure, the fainter grew
inclinations for peace. The Advocate, who was all but omnipotent in
Holland and Zeeland, subsequently denied the imputation of hostility to
the new corporation, but the establishment of the West India Company,