Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/24

 xvi FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE great heart a heart beating with the throbs of inde- pendence newly won. We shall see that Vasco da Gama's voyage was but the last advance in an eighty years' march of discovery, commenced by the king who had secured the national existence of Portugal, and resolutely carried out by the successors of his house. The Dutch supremacy in the East formed the widest expression of their hard-earned freedom at home. It was the spirit which had hurled back Castile on the field of Aljubarrota that opened the Cape route to Portugal; and it was the spirit which had cut the dikes that gained the Spice Archipelago for Holland. The question of questions, here and throughout, is not the size of a European nation, but what sacri- fices it is willing to make for its position in the East. The united Spain and Portugal which lost the su- premacy of the Asiatic routes formed a state on a much larger scale than the little Portugal that had won it. But to united Spain and Portugal, with vast armies to pay, the silver-yielding West Indies seemed a more profitable possession than the silver-absorbing East, and the resources which might have held the Asiatic seas were spent on the Catholic camps of Europe. In the first quarter of the seventeenth cen- tury, the strength of England was not less than that of Holland. But the English nation was as yet pre- pared to risk little for the Indian trade; the English sovereigns would risk nothing; the Dutch people and the Dutch Government were ready to risk much. In