TH

HE spirit of resistance to governments, which had been awakened by the events in France, visited the Netherlands with a revolution no less unexpected and rapid than that which had occurred in Paris. When Belgium was joined to Holland in 1815, to form the kingdom of the United Netherlands, the union was one of convenience on the part of those by whom it was negotiated, to raise a powerful bulwark on the frontiers of France: it was not attended by any mutual affection, or congeniality of habits, in those who were thus joined together. Holland was divided from Belgium, or the Southern provinces, by difference of national character, difference of religion, difference, in some measure, even of language. The Belgians considered themselves as oppressed men, because they had been forced into an union which they never would have sought, and they found, or thought they found, that the terms of that union were unequal. They complained that the king, himself a Dutchman, and stadtholder of Holland, long before he was sovereign of the Netherlands, sacrificed his acquired to his hereditary dominions; that Dutchmen were allowed a monopoly of the general administration; that even from Belgian offices Belgians were practically excluded; that they were taxed for Dutch debts, and for objects exclusively Dutch; that their religion, and the VOL. LXXII.

institutions for education connected with it, were discouraged; that their very language had been banished from their own courts of law; that Belgium, in short, was governed as a conquered province, not as an integral portion of an independent national union.

These topics supplied materials for demagogues and journalists throughout the Netherlands; and they found a still more useful ally in the Catholic priesthood, whose influence there, as every where else, was turned against a government which stood in the way of its aggrandizement. Never submitting willingly to any controlling power vested elsewhere than in their own body, the exercise of such power by a Protestant government is to them both dangerous and profane. In concluding a concordat with the pope, the king had reserved to the state certain rights in the naming of high ecclesiastical dignitaries, and in the constitution of public Catholic seminaries, which the priesthood deemed encroachments on their own privileges. The Liberals, who have vowed enmity to every species of priesthood, and the priests, whose domination cannot endure in any land of liberals, made common cause to extend and foster an angry spirit of discontent throughout the Southern provinces of the United Kingdom. When the States General met, in the end of the preceding year, petitions were presented to them, [R]

coming from almost every parish, and having attached to them, it was said, a million of signatures, complaining of grievances, and praying that they should forthwith be redressed. The topics of complaint were those which had been assiduously preached to the people-the alleged unjust distribution of places and offices, between the inhabitants of the Dutch and Belgic provinces--the interference of a Protestant government in the direction of Catholic schools and education the severe judgments passed on persons accused of libel, and the shackles threatened to be imposed on the freedom of the press-the absence of a law to make the ministers responsible for their acts-the severe and unequal pressure of taxation-and last, though not least, the arbitrary imposition of the Dutch language on those parts of the monarchy where French was generally or exclusively spoken.

The effect of these grievances and complaints on the States General was, the formation of an overpowering majority in the Second Chamber, against the government, a fact which should have put an end to all clamours about unequal representation. The Chamber not only would not accept a law brought in by the ministry for the regulation of the press; it went the length of refusing the supplies. Government then proposed a provisional arrangement, on an assurance that their permanent measures would be reconsidered. Relying on this assurance, the Chamber, with only one dissenting voice, voted the provisional budget, and was adjourned till the 18th of January. When they again met, the budget was presented in a modified shape,

and, as the most objectionable taxes had been exchanged for others less odious, it passed almost unanimously. A Belgian minister of the interior was brought into the cabinet, so as to give the interests of the Southern provinces their due weight in the royal councils. The project of law on public instruction, having been found objectionable in the committees of the States General, was withdrawn, under an engagement to revise it, and present it again in an improved form. The law on the press was thrice modified by the court, and made at last to meet the views of the great majority of the Chambers. The Philosophical College of Louvain, which had been intended by the king to elevate the character of the Catholic clergy, by conferring on the candidates for the priesthood a more liberal education than they could receive at the episcopal seminaries, was abolished—a sacrifice to the prejudices of the Belgic prelacy; the decree enforcing the general use of the Dutch or Flemish languages, in those provinces in which French was the native or customary tongue, was abrogated or modified; and, the further to remove suspicions of the undue interference of a Protestant court, or a ministry chiefly Protestant, with the ecclesiastical rights of his Catholic subjects, the king nominated a Belgic Catholic

as his minister for ecclesiastical affairs.

With these concessions, however, were mixed up certain measures of intimidation. Among the Belgians who joined the majority against the budget, were two or three of the royal chamberlains, and as many commissioners of districts. These gentlemen were

immediately dismissed, while a M. de Stassart, who was neither chamberlain nor civil nor military functionary of any kind, was deprived of his pension, because, besides his zealous opposition on all other occasions, he was the solitary voter against the provisional budget. He had enjoyed his pension since the establishment of the kingdom of the Netherlands, for having acted as prefect during the annexation of Belgium to France, and had therefore some reason to complain that his solitary suffrage should have deprived him of what was truly an allowance earned by past services. The king, in the decree by which he dismissed them, stated expressly that the cause of their dismissal was "the circumstances which had preceded and accompanied the late debates on the budget;" and that "although some of these persons, being also members of the States General, had a constitutional right freely to express their opinions on the measures laid before them, yet that these opinions, when opposed to the principles of the government, which it was their duty as officers to maintain, and cause to be respected by those under them, or to defend as persons especially favoured, did not allow him farther to confide to them the execution of his orders, or to continue to leave them in the enjoyment of especial marks of his favour." This proceeding immediately excited an outcry in Belgium against the government, as having declared, that all Belgians were to be excluded from public employments, unless they lent themselves to Dutch purposes. The dismissed functionaries were declared to be martyrs to the cause of religious liberty and national rights. They

were invited to patriotic banquets, praised in the liberal newspapers, and it was proposed to indemnify them for their loss of place by public subscriptions. On this latter proposal was grafted a scheme, to show the strength of their party, to increase its numbers, and to organize a system of regular resistance to the government. Relying on the popularity of the subscription, its framers proposed that no individual contributor should subscribe more than a florin (about 20d.), and that if any larger sum were offered, the contributor should be considered as having made subscriptions for his friends to the amount of the excess. This collection was to be made through the whole of Belgium, to indemnify not only the functionaries who were alleged to have suffered already for their honesty, but such as should hereafter become the victims of court or Dutch vengeance. It was a sort of Belgic Catholic rent, promoted by an incongruous union of Catholics and liberals, bigots and infidels, to support factious opposition, and encourage national antipathies.

The government did not attempt to interfere with this association, till it was put forward in an improved and more extended shape by a very obnoxious individual. There was a M. de Potter, who, fifteen months before, had been condemned to a year and a half's imprisonment for a libel, and was still suffering under his sentence. He was one of the proprietors of a Belgic newspaper, and, in that capacity, a demagogue; he was the author of several works on ecclesiastical history, in which he had proved himself an inveterate enemy of the Jesuits, with whom party spirit had now brought him

to form a close alliance. From his prison this gentleman recommended, through the public journals, that the plan of a patriotic subscription should be made the basis of a general Belgic confederation, or society of mutual assurance against the encroachments of power, embracing the whole of the Catholic, or Southern provinces. His scheme proposed, that not only public functionaries who made patriotic sacrifices, but all citizens who should suffer from a legal resistance to power, should be indemnified; that the subscribers should form a grand association, in which each should engage to resist legally, when called upon; and that out of this association alone the subscribers should engage to select the Deputies to the States General, together with all the other persons delegated by the people to execute elective functions. The confederation was to be a kind of government within the government, having its own exchequer, paying salaries, assigning honorary rewards, exacting oaths or engagements, and electing national functionaries. Such a confederation would soon have embraced the whole of Belgium, and would have completed the schism which had already appeared in the States General between the Belgic and Dutch portion of the representation.

No sooner did M. Potter's letter appear in the Courier des Pays Bas, of which he was a proprietor, than the law-officers of the Crown were ordered to commence a prosecution against him and his co-proprietor, or editor, M. Coche-Momens. The former being already in prison, the latter was arrested, and both were subjected to close confinement, on a capital charge of attempting to

overthrow the government of the king. M. Vanderstraeten, the editor of the liberal journal called Le Belge, who published the project with approbation; Bartels, editor of Le Catholique; De Neve, the printer of the same paper; and Tielmans, an advocate, were likewise apprehended.

This step on the part of the government was a new cause of popular excitement, and the spirit of association shewed how promptly it was already fitted to act. From 950 to 1,000 petitions were presented to the second Chamber of the States General, all proceeding from Belgic provinces, and supported by Belgic members. Scarcely a village or hamlet in the whole country failed to contribute its quota of grievances, under the skilful direction of some fanatic priest or liberal agitator. Formulas of petitions, ready for subscription, were carried from province to province, from city to city, from parish to parish. The Chamber was engaged from the 8th to the 11th of March in an adjourned debate on the substance, form, and prayer of these 1,000 petitions. The question to be decided was, whether the Assembly should pass to the order of the day, and thus express a sort of disapprobation of the manner in which the petitions had been got up, or should receive them, and allow them to lie on their table. The Dutch members enlarged on the abuses of so valuable a privilege-pointed out the culpable intrigues and manoeuvres of the petition-mongers to obtain signatures-described the cajolery or intimidation which had been employed by the priests to make their flocks join the faction of (what one of them called) the theo-democracy and denounced