For let it never be forgotten that the Union of the Netherlands was a compact, a treaty, an agreement between sovereign states.

There was no pretence that it was an incorporation, that the people had laid down a constitution, an organic law.

The people were never consulted, did not exist, had not for political purposes been invented.

It was the great primal defect of their institutions, but the Netherlanders would have been centuries before their age had they been able to remedy that defect.

Yet the Netherlanders would have been much behind even that age of bigotry had they admitted the possibility in a free commonwealth, of that most sacred and important of all subjects that concern humanity, religious creed--the relation of man to his Maker--to be regulated by the party vote of a political board.
It was with no thought of treason in his heart or his head therefore that the Advocate now resolved that the States of Holland and the cities of which that college was composed should protect their liberties and privileges, the sum of which in his opinion made up the sovereignty of the province he served, and that they should protect them, if necessary, by force.