Essays, Speeches, and Memoirs of Field-Marshal Count Helmuth Von Moltke
by Helmuth Moltke (Graf Von) (9780217712491)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: When, now, Belgium was incorporated into the kingdom of the Netherlands, they extended the constitution, which was originally for Holland, with required modification to both countries. Sixteen hundred and three notables were convoked in order to vote upon the adoption of the fundamental law. Two hundred and eighty of these men, who had not been elected without governmental influence, stayed away, and seven hundred and ninety-six opposed the constitution; and of this itself the Foreign Quarterly Revieiv says: " It is a liberal platform, and its mistakes, if they can be shown, are less what it defines than what it does not define." When one considers that the Belgians certainly had not been spoiled by constitutional treatment under the rule of the empire, these proceedings already give a proximate measure of the state of mind with which Belgium contemplated its mariage de convenance with Holland. When, in consequence of this, the government crossed one hundred and twenty-six of the negative votes so cast on account of the religion of the head of the state, and then counted the two hundred and eighty non- voters as silently affirmative in order thus to secure a majority of eleven, it resorted to this strange kind of arithmetic only for the purpose of avoiding the public scandal incurred by a people that stubbornly rejected the liberty so generously offered them by the government itself. The Belgians were greatly offended because they, who constituted two-thirds of the kingdom as regards area and population, should be represented by the same number of deputies (fifty-five) as Holland. Subsequently several bills were actually passed with a weak majority of two votes, in which one is pleased to see two Belgians in public service who, as the people at Brussels put it, were untrue t...

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