Page:Kickerbocker Feb 1833 vol 1 no 2.djvu/4

party, opposed to the establishment of an hereditary Stadtholdership in the house of Orange, and rendered more ardent in the general cause of freedom, by the success with which these United States had then recently concluded their struggle for independence, proceeded to extremes, and among other measures, a band of the more violent patriots arrested the wife of the Stadtholder, who was sister to the king of Prussia. She immediately besought the aid of her brother, and forthwith a Prussian army of 25,000 men appeared, to avenge the insult and vindicate the cause of the Stadtholder William V. Young Chassé, then only twenty-two years old, and who, with the natural enthusiasm of youth, had embraced the cause of the patriots, was fired with new zeal at the aspect of foreign mercenaries brought into his own native land, to impose upon it by force a government it rejected, and was foremost in the ranks to combat them. But the resistance of the patriots was unskilfully conducted and unsuccessful; and when, in September, 1787, Amsterdam fell into the hands of the Prussians, and the patriot cause was finally lost, Chassé, with others, went into voluntary exile. Soon again, however, lured by the same idol, Liberty, which now was arousing the people of France from the despotism of ages, he entered into the French armies, and so distinguished himself by his gallantry, that in 1793, he had attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1794, he was attached to the army under Pichegru, and made the memorable campaign of 1794–5, when the water defences of Holland, which under ordinary circumstances render her almost impregnable, became the sources of her weakness; and the floods which from her dikes she poured forth over smiling fields and villages, in order that the foot of the invader might be cut from her soil, were bridged over with solid ice, and presented the unwonted and unwelcome spectacle of embattled armies, with their horses and their artillery borne into the very heart of the land, by a path made with no human hands. The arms and the opinions of republican France found ready acceptance among the patriots of Holland, and by their aid, and with their concurrence, the Batavian republic was formed in May, 1795. They too soon found that a republic established by the arms and maintained by the presence of a foreign soldiery, was a mockery of their fairest hopes; and it cannot be doubted, that the delusion which had blinded Chassé to the crime—for crime since the days of Coriolanus to those of Moreau it has been, and ever should be, deemed—of bearing arms with foreigners