continues with a diatribe against the stadtholder: . Therefore: These themes: the primacy of the people, whose servants the politicians are; the need to arm the people in units who elect their own officers; to elect commissioners who investigate government wrongdoing, as a parallel source of power next to the existing institutions; the need to protect the freedom of the press; would be repeated time after time in other Patriot pamphlets and the Patriot press in later years. But these ideas were rooted in a particular perspective on Dutch history, not in abstract philosophical ideas, taken from the French Enlightenment. It was a mixture of old and new ideas, and attitudes to the Dutch constitution. But this mixture would diverge into two distinctive strands in the course of the next few years, until it would lead to an ideological split between the "aristocratic" and "democratic" Patriots. Of course, was just one example of the many pamphlets, both Orangist and Patriot, that were published during the . But these one-off publications were soon joined by an innovation in the vernacular press. Before 1780 the "opinion newspapers," like the and the were written in French, and generally only read by the elite. But in 1781 the Patriot Pieter 't Hoen started a periodical in Dutch in Utrecht, entitled (The Post of the Lower Rhine) that would become a combination of opinion weekly, tabloid, and scandal sheet, with a Patriot bias that attacked the stadtholder and the "aristocratic" Patriots with equal abandon. It was soon joined by an Amsterdam magazine with the same character, the (Political Porter), edited by J.C. Hespe, and later by Wybo Fijnje's (Dutch Historical Journal) in Delft. All these periodicals enjoyed great popularity in middle-class circles, probably because they mixed serious political analysis with scurrilous libels of the political elite. The journalists and publishers were often prosecuted by their enraged victims, but fines and jail-time were part of the job in these times. As they had a national readership they helped Patriot politics go beyond the local confines they would normally have encountered. And their ideological consistency helped to bring about unity in especially the "democratic" wing of the Patriot movement. The Since the late Middle Ages cities in the Habsburg Netherlands had employed citizen militias for external defense (mostly against incursions from neighboring provinces), and to keep public order. These militias, called , played an important part in