Excerpt from History of the Administration of John De Witt: Grand Pensionary of Holland; 1623-1651 The manuscript letters to De Witt, and the drafts of letters from him, fill a very large section of the public Record Office at the Hague. Selections from the latter have been published but a legion of them - all of the utmost consequence m his history - has never seen the light. It is by a careful examination of these, and of the letters addressed to him (none of which has been published), that the author has striven to get at what De Witt's personal influence actually was, and to prevent this estimate of the man's real and personal achievement in the world from degenerating into a vague and general History of his Times, ' in which his doings are not discriminated from those of his con temporaries. Important help has been obtained from our own State Records, and from the unpublished correspondence of the French ambassadors preserved in the public archives at Paris - quarters from which no one hitherto has sought for light on this subject. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.