foreign policy.

These political and economic causes were brought to a head and their effects made more acute by the rigours of religious persecution, until finally the troubles culminated in 1568 in the outbreak of revolt against Spanish authority and the opening of the war that was to last for eighty years.

The war led at first to no breach in the continuity of political development, for the fiction that the struggle was merely one against evil ministers and not against the power or rights of the prince, the sole institution common to them all, was preserved for many years. Of necessity this involved the exercise of sovereignty in the prince's absence and the carrying on of government within each province by the only other existing political organ, the provincial estates. Owing to the circumstances of the struggle, this withdrawal from the princely power was much more complete in the northern provinces than in Brabant and Flanders, which were occupied by Spanish troops and where obedience could therefore be enforced. The estates of the northern provinces became habituated to the exercise of sovereignty by officials chosen by themselves, or, as in Holland, and Zealand by a stadholder who, though royally appointed, was their leader in revolt. It was impossible, however, for a similar habituation to take place in the States-General, where all the provinces were represented, for their meetings were only summoned at rare intervals when Spain was attempting to find some basis of pacification. Even when they did meet deeply rooted divergencies of opinion at once appeared between the southern and the northern provinces, those who lay open to military occupation by the Spanish forces and those who were able to hold it off by the exertions of their armies. The seventeen provinces that in 1550 had seemed well on the road to achieve some sort of federal union, had twenty-five years later been cleft in two by the ravages of war, each part being hammered by adversity into closer and closer association independently of the other.

But this crucial fact did not appear clearly to the actors in

the struggle for many years. What was in reality the irreversible step towards separation was taken in the north, and involved a real confederation of the modern sort. Each of the two provinces of Holland and Zealand was really an association of municipalities, that were as independent one of another as any of the towns of the medieval empire. They had become accustomed, however, to working together for more than a century, and they were all strongly affected by common economic interests. Under the lead of their stadholder, William of Orange, the estates of Holland and Zealand, i.e. the delegates of the municipalities of the provinces, met together in joint session at Delft, in April, 1576, and determined to make their league perpetual by a resignation of a large part of their powers into the hands of a single over-riding authority, the stadholder, who was invested not only with all the ancient powers of the sovereign in external affairs, but also with a much larger measure of internal control. This Act of Federation not only united the provinces, but also went far in the direction of unification of the municipal republics of which each province was composed. It was not in the least dictated by theoretical considerations, but was a practical measure of defence devised to cope with imminent military danger. It went so much further than any previous federal agreement in modern times that it marked a very real step forward. Only among adjacent communities closely affected by similar political and economic circumstances of acute difficulty was its achievement possible.

For the moment the importance of the Act of Federation was obscured by the wave of indignation against Spanish excesses that swept over all the provinces at the news of the "Spanish Fury" in Antwerp in November, 1576. External attack once more precipitated union, and in the Pacification of Ghent a scheme was agreed upon between the delegates of all the seventeen provinces that, if it had endured, would have led to a federation of them all with a common States-General. But unity of feeling was short-lived. Differences of religion, political

and economic interest proved too deep-seated to admit of effective common action, and at length on 5 January, 1579, the deputies of the southern provinces of Hainault, Douai, and Artois bound themselves in a defensive league at Arras as a preliminary to effecting a reconciliation with the King of Spain. The provinces of the north at once replied by gathering round the federation of Holland-Zealand. In the Union of Utrecht, signed by the associates on 29 January, 1579, they bound themselves "as though they were one province" to resist all foreign enemies, including the King of Spain. The confederacy of the United Provinces was thus brought into being to deal with the enormously enhanced military danger that they feared from the south, and its provisions bear full evidence of its preparation to cope with a particular political situation. Owing to the protraction of the struggle for seventy years more the provisions of the union became the permanent constitution of the confederacy, and were supplemented by the Act of Abjuration of 26 July, 1587, whereby the representatives of the United Provinces solemnly absolved themselves from their allegiance to the King of Spain, and thus assumed the full sovereignty they had long possessed in all but name. The long and exhausting struggle that had to be sustained before the Spanish danger was finally repulsed welded the confederacy into a permanent federal union, but it was not until the upheaval of 1795 that the next step forward to complete unity was accomplished.

§ 3.

The growth of federalism in the English-speaking countries has been brought about by similar causes and under generally similar conditions to those that have furthered it on the continent of Europe. But historical conditions have made the manner of growth and the resulting associations very different. In the English constitutional theory of the eighteenth century all sovereignty belonged to the King, but the monarchy was

carefully limited and balanced. The sovereignty of the King over all Englishmen was indefeasible wherever they might be, but, on the other hand, they, too, had indefeasible rights, and, above all, that of being consulted in representative assembly before the executive power was exerted in matters that directly concerned them.

When, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Englishmen had gone oversea to establish colonies in Virginia, Bermuda, St. Christoper's, Barbados, Massachusetts, and so on, they took their rights to representation with them, and in each colony an assembly was set up to take counsel with the governor concerning the internal affairs of the community. Each colony was independent of every other, their only common link in theory being the allegiance that every one of their individual citizens owed to the King. The sovereignty of the King was exercised for the good of the Empire as a whole, and every colony accepted as necessary the arrangement whereby the relations between different parts of the empire, especially in matters of trade, were regulated by the King in Parliament, i.e. by the King's ministers in counsel with his subjects in the representative assembly of the central part of his realm. But from the very beginning the constitutional doctrine was held that the sovereign power within a colony, mostly evidenced by the power of taxation, lay in the King in the assembly of the colony, and not in the Parliament of England, in which the colonists had no representation.

Just as independent states may enter into alliance for the accomplishment of a common purpose, so the New England colonies, when faced with great danger of attack by Indian tribes in 1643, agreed to enter into a confederation for mutual defence, and pledged themselves to contribute in proportion to their numbers. The agreement bears some signs of having been influenced by Dutch precedents, which were familiar to the colonists. It was never of great importance, for the threatened external dangers were too soon removed to have much effect in

consolidating the confederation at the expense of the individual colonial governments. The high-handed scheme of James II. for sweeping away all colonial boundaries in New England and merging the whole into a single province under Sir Edmund Andros was also only of temporary interest, for it had not come into effective operation before the Revolution of 1688 came to restore the old arrangements.

It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that the colonial system of the empire reached some degree of stability in a form that can now be recognized as essentially federal in principle. If it be granted that the essence of federalism is the separation of the powers of government over a particular community, some of the powers being placed in the hands of one authority and some in another, so that both cut concurrently on the citizens but each has its own sphere of action, then undoubtedly the old colonial system was federal in practice. The central authority or Imperial government had charge of foreign affairs, the navy and army, war and peace, the collection of customs dues, the management of unsettled lands, and the relations with the Indian tribes on the frontier. these matters affected the life of every colonial without the intervention of his elected assembly. But the separate colonies managed their own internal police, raised their own taxes for local purposes, regulated local trade, and generally governed their citizens according in most cases to the provisions of a written constitutional instrument or charter which they regarded as a compact between them and the Crown. The system was apparently one of intricate complexity, but it was in reality very flexible, because it had grown up out of a multitude of devices used to deal with practical difficulties, only those which had succeeded being retained.

All

During the period down to 1763, the external menace of the power of France and Spain, with whom the colonists might at any moment find themselves at war, kept them from any sustained protest against the exercise of the Imperial power.