How Belgium Saved Europe Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from What Europe Owes to Belgium Such had been the causes of difference in 1579 and substantially the same causes produced civil war in the kingdom of the United Netherlands only fifteen years after it had been created. The population of Holland was considerably smaller than that of Belgium; but the king was a Dutchman; the Dutch usually con trived to make a majority in the national parliament; and the ministers of the crown were chosen by the king from'his own countrymen. Both the bad and the good measures of this Government were displeasing to the Belgians they were indignant at its attempts to make Dutch the official language, and also at its adoption of a policy of complete religious tolerance. They found that the Dutch system of taxation was so contrived as to bear hardly on the Belgian provinces; and they grumbled because their clergy were compelled to go through a course of higher education. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.