THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY 63 capital of, say, £540,000, and with ample powers of con- quest or attack vested in it by the State, was recognized by friend and foe as a new national force. It marks, in truth, the final development of that policy of sea- war by sea-trade with which Holland had first con- fronted, and was now about to beat down, Spain. The States-General perfectly understood that there could be no peace between the two nations. It was not merely a question of the sullen Spanish pride, and of the long slaughter of Protestant saints and patriots in sacked towns and on bloody fields; it was also the spectral procession of those one hundred thousand judi- cial murders of peaceful men and women by fire and torture and burying alive, before the country rose in its despair, that compelled every act of Holland to be an act of war against Spain. The United East India Company was the instrument by which the Dutch were to compel the oppressor first to an unwilling truce, and finally to let them go. That magnificent achievement belongs to European history, and I here venture only to note a few of the first landmarks which it left behind in Asia. In 1602 the fleet of the Dutch Company routed the Portuguese near Bantam, and laid open for ever the road to the Moluc- cas or Spice Islands. From that date the ascendency of the Dutch in the Eastern seas, although subject to occasional checks, was only a question of time. In 1603 they threatened Goa, the middle capital of the Indo-Portuguese route, and in 1606 blockaded its western terminus by carrying the war into the estuary
