Extract uyt de politique conferentien, beginnende met het onwêer van den eersten januarij. Anno 1690. ...

Regents. Item, whether one or four Burgomasters or [together] with the thirty-six Councilors may keep their Privileges up their sleeves, neglect, break, and make them. He would have added a length of items, but Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others interrupted him, the former saying: "Tut, tut, you ought to know by now that it is an occulta qualitas hidden quality in the Regents to use the Privileges and the common People like a good rider uses his own spurs on a hired horse."

For when one needs them, or fears them, or when they help the Regents in whatever they undertake for their own private gain, one calls them the good Community, the free Inhabitants, the Pious Citizens, even fellow-Citizens; but if they dare to mention rights or Privileges for themselves, they are the rabble, the Jan Hagel rabble/scum, mutineers, and riotous subjects.

Upon this, La Court continued: The Republics and Regents of the ancients were set like this City and these Regents; for they did not seek a Supreme Head and would rather have destroyed the state than given up their Privileges, and that is what the Highly-Esteemed Rulers of Amsterdam also aim for. That name, Highly-Esteemed, said Demosthenes, would not have sounded well with us, especially if it were applicable to only one or two Persons: For it tastes very much of Supreme Power. I know well, Verulamius added—whom La Court, because he was an Englishman, hardly wanted to hear—that in the Republics of Venice, Ragusa, and others, a man was set as a City Head, but [it was] also [true] that he had less Power than one of the members of the government; on the contrary, I notice that in Amsterdam, which aims at becoming a Republic or state on its own, a triumvirate already rules; that one, becoming entirely Master, will not allow himself to be handled like a Mole in a Cherry Tree, or like a current Stadtholder. One thinks one has hit upon the right time to lift or obstruct the Stadtholder, who is concerned and burdened with the general welfare of Europe and his Fatherland in particular. But I give the most partial person or Regent of Amsterdam to consider in Conscience whether this is honest and reasonable? Leaving aside the Stadtholder’s merits, the Power entrusted to him, the Praise given to him so recently on the Exchange and the Dam, the thanks that all free peoples, and especially those of the Reformed Religion, owe him; leaving all this, I ask whether one does not make the poor, simple Inhabitants, to whom one holds up the pleasant mask of the conservation of Privileges, unhappy by giving rise to such a Civil War? For which are these