The Peril of the Republic of the United States of America - Percy T. Magan

that his liaisons are the scandal of the annals of his
state.
For national and popular rights he had a
loathing which he never attempted to disguise. For
the people itself,--“that vile and mischievous
animal called the people,”--as far as their
inalienable rights were concerned he entertained a
most supreme contempt. It was during his reign
that the great struggle for freedom in the
Netherlands broke out. “It was a great episode,--the
longest, the darkest, the bloodiest, the most
important episode in the history of the religious
reformation in Europe.” Spain was determined to
put the Netherlands in a quarantine so effective that
the religious pest of Protestantism should find no
entrance. In the Netherlands the scaffold had many
victims, but the numbers of its converts were few
indeed. In that land there were men and women
who dared and suffered much for conscience’ sake.
They were not fanatics. “For them all was terrible
reality. The emperor and his edicts were realities;
the ax, the stake, were realities; and the heroism
with which men took each other by the hand and
124