It was therefore, a primarily religious issue, and no difference of race, language or material interest, {271} that divided the Netherlands into two halves. For a time the common hatred of all the people for the foreigner welded them into a united whole; but no sooner was the pressure of the Spanish yoke even slightly relaxed than the mutual antipathy of Calvinist and Catholic showed itself. If we look closely into the causes why the North should become predominantly Protestant while the South gradually reverted to an entirely Catholic faith, we must see that the reasons were in part racial, in part geographical and in part social. Geographically and linguistically the Northern provinces looked for their culture to Germany, and the Southern provinces to France. Moreover the easy defensibility of Holland and Zeeland, behind their moats, made them the natural refuge of a hunted sect and, this tendency once having asserted itself, the polarization of the Netherlands naturally followed, Protestants being drawn and driven to their friends in the North and Catholics similarly finding it necessary or advisable to settle in the South. Moreover in the Southern provinces the two privileged classes, clergy and nobility, were relatively stronger than in the almost entirely bourgeois and commercial North. And the influence of both was thrown into the scale of the Roman church, the first promptly and as a matter of course, the second eventually as a reaction from the strongly democratic tendency of Calvinism. In some of the Southern cities there ensued at this time a desperate struggle between the Protestant democracy and the Catholic aristocracy. The few Protestants of gentle birth in the Walloon provinces felt ill at ease in company with their Dutch co-religionists and were called by them "Malcontents" because they looked askance at the political principles of the North. [Sidenote: January 1579]