The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to offer a closer parallel to this of Britain. But a ruthless fanaticism, religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs. Spain fought with grandeur, heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour frustrate and her devotion vain. She warred against the light, and the enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races and generations unborn. What criterion of truth, what principle even of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of Spain? England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods the methods of Spain. The war in Africa--is it then a war waged for the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria? But, it is urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same stubborn, unyielding stock as our own." In the sense that they are Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking, and the Norseman. The best blood of the Teutonic race for six centuries went to the making of England. At the period when the Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the empire of the future. As for the former clause of the assertion, it is accurate of no race, no nation. The history of the United Provinces does not close with John de Witt and William III. Can those critics of the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes, and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars, the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of Amsterdam to Brunswick?