I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there, under a threat of ministerial disapprobation, the Town Councilors were sometimes obliged to suppress a secret society of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets printed by a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as long as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the market place to denounce the doctrine of predestination or carry a big rosary into a public dining-hall or deny the existence of God in the South Side Methodist Church of Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity which for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable haven of rest for all those who in other parts of the world were persecuted for the sake of their opinions. Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad. And during the next two hundred years, the print shops and the coffee-houses of Holland were filled with a motley crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a strange new army of spiritual liberation. CHAPTER XX BRUNO It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that the Great War was a war of non-commissioned officers. While the generals and the colonels and the three-star strategists sat in solitary splendor in the halls of some deserted château and contemplated miles of maps until they could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to give them half a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals, aided and abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did the so-called “dirty work” and eventually brought about the collapse of the German line of defense. The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought along similar lines. There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half a million soldiers. There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s gunners with an easy and agreeable target. I might go even further and say that the vast majority of the people never knew that there was any fighting at all. Now and then, curiosity may have compelled them to ask who was being burned that morning or who was going to be hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants disapproved most heartily. But I doubt whether such information affected them beyond the point of mild regret and the comment that it must be very sad for their poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible end. It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually accomplish for the cause for which they give their lives cannot possibly be reduced to mathematical formulae or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.