As we write these final words a hundred years have gone by since the days of the French domination and of the many revolutionary upheavals; the nation of the year 1813, broken down under the hopeless feeling of failure, and the people, despairing of the future and indifferent to everything of the present which did not touch their bread and butter, have disappeared. One after the other they travelled the road to those open air cemeteries which they had so much detested as a revolutionary innovation, their ancestors all slept under their own church-pews, and their place was taken by younger blood. But it was not until the year 1870 that we could notice a more hopeful attitude in the point of view of the Dutch nation. Then, at last, it recovered from the blows of the first twelve years of the century. Then it regained the courage of its own individual convictions and once more was ready to take up the burden of nationality. Once more the low countries aspired to that place among the nations to which their favourable geographical position, the thrift of their population, and the enterprise of their leading merchants so fully entitled them. The revival, when it came, was along all lines. Scholarship in many branches of learning compared very favourably with the best days of the old republic. The arts revived and brought back glimpses of the seventeenth century. Social legislation gave the country an honourable place among those states which earnestly endeavour to mitigate the disadvantages of our present capitalistic development and by direct interference of the legislature aim for a higher type of society in which the many shall not spend their lives in a daily drudgery for the benefit of the few. The feeling that colonies were merely an agreeable asset to the merchants of the country and called for no special obligations upon their part gradually gave way to the modern view that the colonies are a trust which for many a year to come must stay in the hands of European men before they shall be able to render them to the natives for a rule of their own people. Finally that most awful and most despondent of all sentimental meditations, that "we have been a great country once," that "we have had our time," has begun to make place for the conviction that at this very moment no other nation of such a small area and insignificant number of people is capable of performing such valuable service in so many fields of human endeavour as is the modern Dutch nation. The failure of the men of 1795, who dreamed their honest but ineffectual dream of a prosperous and united fatherland, the apparent failure of the first Dutch king who in the true belief of his own direct responsibility still belonged to a bygone age, have at last made place for a healthy and modern state capable of normal development.