At noon the expurgated assembly set to work. It abolished the old rules of the house which for three years had provided a parliamentary procedure which allowed of no practical progress. It abolished all provincial and county sovereignty. And then it took an even more important step, and on the afternoon of the 22d of January, of the year of our Lord 1798, the roaring of many cannon announced to the Batavian people that the republic possessed its first "Constitutional Assembly"—a gathering of true unionists who would not disperse until the constitution of the republic should have become an established fact.
An intermediary body consisting of five members and presided over by a well-known unionist, Citizen Vreede, was announced to have assumed the executive duties. The assembly approved, and then it appointed a committee of seven to proceed with all haste and make a suitable constitution.
It was now well past the lunch hour, when suddenly there resounded a great applause among the members of the eager galleries.
Enters Citizen Delacroix, minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary from the Republic of France. "Long live the glorious French Republic!" The real author of our little comedy appears to make a curtain speech. He thanked his audience. Really he was greatly touched by such a warm reception. Such energy and such resolution as had been shown that night by the true friends of the fatherland deserved his full approbation. "Continue, Citizens, on this path! The Directory will support you, yea, the whole French nation will applaud you and encourage you on your path toward your high destiny." Loud cheers from the gallery. The Minister sat down.
Then a speech of thanks by the Speaker of the assembly. You can read it if you are so inclined on page 125 of the thirty-fifth volume of Wagenaar, but I have not got the courage to repeat it here. There was a great deal in it about the enemies of liberty, the noble and magnanimous French ally, the peoples of Europe, and the humble desire of the assembly that the Citizen Representative would deign to occupy a seat of honour in this noble hall. And then the Speaker of the house, having obtained permission to leave the chair, descended to the floor of the assembly and among breathless quiet he pressed upon the noble brow of Citizen Delacroix the imprint of a brotherly kiss.
XI
THE CONSTITUTIONAL
The report of this kiss resounded to Paris. So greatly did it please the French Directorate that they at once increased the number of troops which the republic was obliged to equip and support, and demanded that henceforth the French Government might officially dispose over three fourths of the Batavian army. Let us come down to plain facts. After three years of revolutionary rhetoric the Batavian Republic for all intents and purposes had become a French province—a province inhabited by rather backwoodsy people (the Batavian minister as chief Rube in the Follies of 1798, an enormous success), people who simply never could make up their minds, whose very political upheavals had to be staged abroad, who had to be guided about like small children, and who only received some respect from their neighbours because they still had a few pennies in their pocketbook. But otherwise, Oh lálá! they were so funny! And Citizen Delacroix, having accepted a nice little gratuity (a golden snuffbox studded with diamonds and filled with gold pieces), wrote back to Paris that being minister to The Hague was as good fun as an evening at vaudeville. This, however, was merely the beginning. Much else was to follow soon.
Here we have a country becoming every day more like a French department. And what did the thinking part of the nation do? It continued its petty political quarrels as if it consisted of a lot of villagers engaged in the habitual row in the local vestry. The Orangeistic party of these years reminds us strongly of those pious supporters of the Pope who wish to see the whole kingdom of Italy go to smash in order that his Holiness may return to govern a city which during many previous centuries of his august rule was turned into a byword for civic mismanagement and municipal corruption. The Orangeists sat in their little corner and jeered at everything the patriots did. But they lacked the courage and the conviction to come forward and assist in such constructive work as the revolutionary parties tried to perform.