Eleventh Court Maxim: The United Provinces are ever to be esteemed enemies

Philalethes: next to those things of universal practice, our corrupting of servants to betray their masters, setting wives against their husbands, children against their parents, and employing spies and trepanners in all places; knowing that those that are divided among themselves can never hurt us; there is nothing we more rely upon than our bishops at home and foreign helps from the king of France. Your reasons make me suspect neither of these will long secure us from ruin. But I will proceed to the examining *of* other points of opinion and practice amongst us.

We look on the United Provinces as immortal, irreconcilable enemies, and by all ways imaginable we seek their ruin.

Eunomius: is not the narrowness of their hand, seldom exercised in giving bribes, the chief cause of your enmity against them?

Philalethes: that may be something. But we also look on their power and riches, the security, happiness, | and prosperity they enjoy in a commonwealth, as a most pernicious example to England. Others leave their native countries, abounding in things necessary or delightful to man, to seek new seats in Holland, of all Europe the most unwholesome, unpleasant, unprovided, of all things requisite to the life of man; yet through good government and liberty of traffic so rich, powerful, and prosperous that no state in Europe dares singly contest with it.