existing between the most distant provinces of Italy and France. They differ in language, in costume and in character, in race and in religion. The communal _regime_ has impressed on this nation an indelible stamp, because nowhere else has it so conformed to the nature of things. The interests of the country are divided into various groups, of whose organization the hydraulic system is an example. Hence association and mutual help against the common enemy, the sea, but freedom of action in local institutions. The monarchical _regime_ has not extinguished the ancient municipal spirit, which frustrated the efforts of all those great states that tried to absorb Holland. The great rivers and deep gulfs serve both as commercial roads which constitute a national bond between the various provinces, and as barriers which defend their ancient traditions and provincial customs. In this land, which is apparently so uniform, one may say that everything save the aspect of nature changes at every step--changes suddenly, too, as does nature itself, to the eye of one who crosses the frontier of this state for the first time. [Illustration: Dutch Fishing Boats.] But, however wonderful the physical history of Holland may be, its political history is even more marvellous. This little country, invaded first by different tribes of the Germanic race, subdued by the Romans and by the Franks, devastated by the Danes and by the Normans, and wasted for centuries by terrible civil wars,--this little nation of fishermen and merchants preserved its civil freedom and liberty of conscience by a war of eighty years' duration against the formidable monarchy of Philip II., and founded a republic which became the ark of salvation for the freedom of all peoples, the adopted home of the sciences, the exchange of Europe, the station of the world's commerce; a republic which extends its dominion to Java, Sumatra, Hindostan, Ceylon, New Holland, Japan, Brazil, Guiana, the Cape of Good Hope, the West Indies, and New York; a republic that conquered England on the sea, that resisted the united armies of Charles II. and of Louis XIV., that treated on terms of equality with the greatest nations, and for a time was one of the three powers that ruled the destinies of Europe.