The road to political influence was open to all, not by right of birth, but through honorable exertion of heads and hands.
The chief city of the Netherlands, the commercial capital of the world, was Antwerp.

In the North and East of Europe, the Hanseatic league had withered with the revolution in commerce.

At the South, the splendid marble channels, through which the overland India trade had been conducted from the Mediterranean by a few stately cities, were now dry, the great aqueducts ruinous and deserted.

Verona, Venice, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Bruges, were sinking, but Antwerp, with its deep and convenient river, stretched its arm to the ocean and caught the golden prize, as it fell from its sister cities' grasp.

The city was so ancient that its genealogists, with ridiculous gravity, ascended to a period two centuries before the Trojan war, and discovered a giant, rejoicing in the classic name of Antigonus, established on the Scheld.