248 Chapter XI
Provide for the freedom of the press, the one support of your national
liberty....
Arm yourselves, elect those who must command you... and in all
things proceed like the people of America, with modesty and composure.^8
The unknown author was indeed a democraat, and even a revolutionary in a way.
He urged a popular arming, as in Ireland and America, and the formation of self-
authorized citizen groups, which, like the Irish convention and the American
committees, or like the associations in England, should claim to represent the
country better than any organ of government, and to bring upon the existing con-
stituted bodies a pressure not recognized as legitimate in the history or constitu-
tion of the country. He did not propose to abolish anything, beyond a few “abuses.”
Nor did he clearly envisage the creation of anything new. He was far from the
American theory of a constituent power. He had in mind, rather, a public inspec-
tion or scrutiny over the multitude of councils, estates, boards, colleges, and magis-
tracies of the historic republic. He made little appeal to the “philosophy” of the day.
He did not argue from the enlightenment of the age, or nature and reason, or the
social contract, or human rights, or liberty and equality in the abstract. He was
aroused by the unreliability of his own government in a time of war. Pointing to
common- sense analogies, like stock ownership in a business enterprise, or the
American rebellion (still before Yorktown), he arrived at an affirmation of popular
sovereignty. He did so for an immediate purpose, to displace a small governing
group which could not otherwise be opened up or removed. He looked backwards
as well as forwards, as did many like him in Britain and America, and his argu-
ments were historical in their character if not in the accuracy of their content. He
hoped to return to a freer regime which he believed to have existed before heredi-
tary oligarchy had closed in. Even three years later, when Capellen’s circle pro-
duced the nearest thing to a constitutional project, they called it the Grondwettige
Herstelling, or constitutional “restoration.” They here declared, with due precaution
against influence of the real lower classes or populace, that the Dutch constitution,
when rightly understood, was and properly always had been, “democratic.”^9 It was
the failure of such arguments to accomplish anything in the 1780’s that forced
men into the more radical positions of the 1790’s. In Holland, as in England, even
the first stirrings in a democratic direction brought on a systematic conservative
reply. The learned Adrian Kluit, one of the founders of historical jurisprudence in
the Netherlands, was so irritated by the Grondwettige Herstelling that he answered
it with a pamphlet, in 1785, The sovereignty of the Estates of Holland defended against
8 Van der Capellen tot de Pol, Aan het VoIk. van Nederland, as quoted by P. Geyl, Patriotten be-
weging, 53–54. This pamphlet was translated into English as An address to the People of the Netherlands
(London, 1782).
9 The Dutch Patriots seem to have used the words “democracy” and “democrat” infrequently in
application to themselves. J. van de Giessen, De ophomst van het woord democratie als leuze in Nederland
(The Hague, 1948), finds that the use of “democracy” as a catchword began with social democracy in
the 1880’s, and that the “Eastern” use of the term, emphasizing equality of income and opportunity,
is historically more accurate than the “Western.” While this seems at best only partly true, the author’s
claim that self- accepted use of the term was more common among the Patriots of the 1780’s than
among the Batavians after 1795 is undoubtedly mistaken.