The Union of Utrecht was the foundation-stone of the Netherland Republic; but the framers of the confederacy did not intend the establishment of a Republic, or of an independent commonwealth of any kind.  They had not forsworn the Spanish monarch.  It was not yet their intention to forswear him.  Certainly the act of union contained no allusion to such an important step.  On the contrary, in the brief preamble they expressly stated their intention to strengthen the Ghent Pacification, and the Ghent Pacification acknowledged obedience to the King.  They intended no political innovation of any kind.  They expressly accepted matters as they were.  All statutes, charters, and privileges of provinces, cities, or corporations were to remain untouched.  They intended to form neither an independent state nor an independent federal system.  No doubt the formal renunciation of allegiance, which was to follow within two years, was contemplated by many as a future probability; but it could not be foreseen with certainty.

The simple act of union was not regarded as the constitution of a commonwealth.  Its object was a single one—­defence against a foreign oppressor.  The contracting parties bound themselves together to spend all their treasure and all their blood in expelling the foreign soldiery from their soil.  To accomplish this purpose, they carefully abstained from intermeddling with internal politics and with religion.  Every man was to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.  Every combination of citizens, from the provincial states down to the humblest rhetoric club, was to retain its ancient constitution.  The establishment of a Republic, which lasted two centuries, which threw a girdle of rich dependencies entirely round the globe, and which attained so remarkable a height of commercial prosperity and political influence, was the result of the Utrecht Union; but, it was not a premeditated result.  A state, single towards the rest of the world, a unit in its external relations, while permitting internally a variety of sovereignties and institutions—­ in many respects the prototype of our own much more extensive and powerful union—­was destined to spring from the act thus signed by the envoys of five provinces.  Those envoys were acting, however, under the pressure of extreme necessity, and for what was believed an evanescent purpose.  The future confederacy was not to resemble the system of the German empire, for it was to acknowledge no single head.  It was to differ from the Achaian league, in the far inferior amount of power which it permitted to its general assembly, and in the consequently greater proportion of sovereign attributes which were retained by the individual states.  It was, on the other hand, to furnish a closer and more intimate bond than that of the Swiss confederacy, which was only a union for defence and external purposes, of cantons otherwise independent.  It was, finally, to differ from