Page:Masterpieces of American Humor (Little Blue Book 959).djvu/63

Rh and irate adherent of the Stuarts says, in his history, looking with vengeance upon the accession of William of Orange to the throne of England, that the Puritan and the Hollander were shaken out of the same bag. And so they were. The same vigorous Northern stock came down to settle upon the marshes of Holland and in the fens of England. The stock that remained in England produced Pym and Hamp-den, and Sidney and Russell, with a cross of Swedish pirate or Northern conqueror; but the original stock which went to Holland fought off forever, during its whole existence, the power of the Roman Empire; fought off the hordes of barbarians who came down upon the ruins of the Roman Empire; fought off all the forces and powers of medieval chivalry, and won their grand victory when they took from the sea herself a land, that upon it they might govern themselves upon the principles of their own manhood and of civil and religious liberty. Those people were not a selfish people; but they liked to be by themselves and to govern themselves. Theirs was precisely the sentiment of the Hebrew speculator in Wall Street recently, who, when he had scooped everybody about him, gathered his co-conspirators around the festive board and said to them, "Now, shentlemen, we feel shust as if we were among ourselves."

Holland, at a time when there was no light for man elsewhere in the world, preserved the  principles of civil liberty. Holland, at a time when learning was crushed out or buried in the monasteries, had her asylums, her libraries,