which their independence was formerly and finally recognized, was concluded without the consent of Zealand. Even as recently as the last treaty of peace with Great Britain, the constitutional principle of unanimity was departed from. A weak Constitution must necessarily terminate in dissolution, for want of proper powers, or the usurpation of powers requisite for the public safety. Whether the usurpation, when once begun, will stop at the salutary point, or go forward to the dangerous extreme, must depend on the contingencies of the moment. Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective Constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.
Notwithstanding the calamities produced by the Stadtholdership, it has been supposed, that without his influence in the individual provinces, the causes of anarchy manifest in the Confederacy would long ago have dissolved it. "Under such a government," says the Abbé Mably, "the Union could never have subsisted, if the provinces had not a spring within themselves, capable of quickening their tardiness, and compelling them to the same way of thinking. This spring is the Stadtholder." It is remarked by Sir William Temple, "that in the intermissions of the Stadtholdership, Holland, by her riches and her authority, which drew the others into a sort of dependence, supplied the place."
These are not the only circumstances which have controlled the tendency to anarchy and dissolution. The surrounding powers impose an absolute necessity of Union to a certain degree, at the same time that they nourish by their intrigues the constitutional vices, which keep the republic in some degree always at their mercy.
The true patriots have long bewailed the fatal tendency of these vices, and have made no less than four regular experiments by extraordinary assemblies, con-
