The Netherlands
discomfiture. “Peuple frondeur,” Louis Napoleon aptly characterized the nation over which he ruled for a few brief years. But, for all that, his reign was a popular one; he proved an acceptable ruler to his subjects, whose descendants cherish his memory to the present day. A great national peril might kindle the embers slumbering in the Dutch bosom, and arouse in it the spirit which defied the Duke of Alva and Louis XIV.
Truly a wonderful nation, which for eighty years struggled with all-powerful Spain, which was run over under Napoleon, accomplishing the while marvellous triumphs in drainage and land reclamation, producing the foremost scholars in Europe, a body of almost unparalleled painters, revealing remarkable colonizing and commercial aptitude, and the founders of the United States to a far greater extent
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