Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 127.djvu/625

Rh pressure is greatest on the western coast, where, after the prevalence of particular winds, stupencfous masses of troubled water are thrown back on Holland from the narrows at Dover. But man has never relaxed in the work of entrenching and embanking; and now indefatigable industry is supplemented by the resources of science, and organized upon a system that experience has brought almost to perfection. Some of the great sea-dykes, such as those near the Helder and those others that protect the low-lying islands of Friesland, are triumphs of engineering as well as gigantic monuments of labour, while the works that bank in the dangerous flow of the lower Rhine scarcely yield to them in grandeur of execution. The Dutch, at the cost of an immense expenditure, have done nearly all that is to be done by man, and have fortified themselves pretty effectually at all points. Yet, to say nothing of the heavy insurance they have to pay on their lives and property in the shape of the annual outlay on these waterworks, it is nothing but habit and natural courage that can have enabled them to live with easy minds and go on labouring hopefully for the future. For there is little exaggeration in the saying, that the springing of a leak may sink a province; and although the sea has latterly been kept at arm's-length, yet the inundations of the rivers are periodically disastrous. You ought to have strong nerves to slumber tranquilly in stormy weather behind the great bulwarks of Kappel; but in the provinces of Gelderland and North Brabant many a man night after night must go to his bed in unpleasant uncertainty as to whether he may not be swept out of it before morning, to find himself adrift in an archipelago of ice-masses.

As the Dutch have made their country what it is, so the country has made the Dutch what they are. No wonder that men who, like their fathers before them, have been trained in such a school of self-reliance, should be good soldiers and good sailors, good traders, good farmers, and, above all, good patriots. They have learned to value the blessings they have to toil so hard for, and the country they have to hold by hard fighting. But as the climate is as ungenial as the soil is ungrateful unless it is assiduously kept in condition, they have to make the very most of the means at their disposal, and have naturally learned to practise frugality. Agriculture and dairy-farming alone could scarcely have covered the indispensable expenses of keeping out the ocean, so the Dutch early betook themselves to commerce, to stave off the poverty that threatened them. Bred to maritime adventure off their own dangerous coasts, they carried discovery into every ocean. It would be unfair to say that their early merchants and navigators were stimulated solely by the hope of gain, otherwise they would never have risked lives and ships on their desperate exploring expeditions in frozen latitudes. But, as a rule, being a highly practical people, profit and adventure went hand in hand. With their national determination, they persevered in establishing trading relations where these were most likely to be most lucrative; they set down their foot on the rich Spice Islands, whose revenues have since been such a godsend to the State as well as individuals; they laid themselves out for trade-monopolies, to the exclusion of their rivals, as when they established their factories at Nagasaki in Japan. It must be owned that, in their trading, they often stooped, or even crawled, to conquer, as when the officials of these Japanese establishments consented to degrade themselves annually, in solemn ceremony, before the mikado, that they might retain his countenance by their abject submission. But although, like the Americans, they worshipped the almighty dollar, and are said, in their adoration of it, to have gone so far as to trample on the cross, yet, whatever we may think of their compliances, there can be no question of their courage. And however far-sighted their statesmen and chief burghers may have been, their seamen were by no means of imaginative temperaments, or apt to conjure up remote dangers. They fought their enemies, whoever these were and whenever they met them, without measuring the forces or the power they might provoke; but they fought them all the more fiercely beyond the line, that it was so far a cry to Europe from the Spice Islands and the Spanish main. It was but natural that men who had always been disputing their land to the ocean should be hard to conquer, and impossible to enslave. They held to their property — no men more so: drowning it on occasion did not seem to the Dutchmen such a very desperate resource, since they had familiar experience of inundations, when they had had no time to prepare for them. And the prospect of a terrible revenge sweetened the sacrifice, for no people could be more vindictively fierce when their passions were excited: witness their 