No doubt the dukes of Burgundy were helped in their work of unification by a series of most favourable circumstances. Within a remarkably short time, many marriages and deaths occurred which favoured their plans to a very considerable extent. But it would be a great mistake to attribute their success to fate alone. Their power was so great that, through political pressure and offers of money, they might, in any case, have induced the less favoured princes of the country to part with their domains. And, what is far more important, economic and political circumstances were such as to render the old system of local divisions obsolete and to necessitate the formation of a central administration pooling the resources and directing the common policy of all parts of the country. It was not through the process of Burgundian unification that Belgium became a nation. It was because Belgium had already practically become a nation, through the gradual intercourse of the various principalities, that one prince, more favoured than his neighbours at the time, was able to concentrate in his hands the power of all the Belgian princes. It is not without reason, nevertheless, that Justus Lipsius, the Belgian humanist of the seventeenth century, calls Philip the Good "conditor Belgii," the founder of Belgium. If this prince benefited from the efforts of his predecessors, if he enjoyed tremendous opportunities, he was wise enough to make full use of them. While enlarging his possessions and even contemplating, no doubt, the foundation of a great European Empire, he proceeded step by step and did not launch into any wild enterprise which might have jeopardized the future. While building up a centralized State such as the legists of the Renaissance conceived it, a State independent of local institutions and possessing a distinct life apart from the people and above them, he endeavoured, as much as possible, to respect local privileges, superimposing modern institutions on mediaeval ones and preserving, if not wholly, at least formally, the rights of each province and town. [_THE GREAT DUKE OF THE WEST_]