The provisional representatives of the people of Holland, the
provisional representatives of the people of Zeeland, the provisional
representatives of all the nine provinces (for the old generalities had
been proclaimed into provinces), the provisional municipalities and
provisional committees on the provisional revolution--the names indicate
sufficiently the provisionally of the whole undertaking.
Curiously enough (but the contemporary of course could not know this)
the Provisional government worked more and to a better effect than the
permanent form of government by which it was followed. It had one great
advantage: there was such an insistent demand for immediate action that
there was a correspondingly small chance for idle talking. The
professional orators, the silver-tongued rhetoricians, had their innings
at a later date. For the moment only men of deeds were wanted, and the
best elements of the Patriotic party cheerfully stepped forward to do
their duty.
Pieter Paulus, by right of his ability, was the official and unofficial
head. He remained at The Hague and ran the national Provisional
government, while Citizen Schimmelpenninck stayed in Amsterdam and kept
that important dynamo of democratic power running smoothly. Both leaders
had their troubles, but not from foreign enemies. It is true that the
young Prince of Orange was contemplating a wild filibustering scheme and
had called for volunteers to compose an army of invasion. The half-pay
officers of the former régime had hastened to his colours. But very few
soldiers were willing to risk their lives for such an unpopular cause,
and with an army composed of two soldiers for each officer no great
military operations were possible. Wherefore the plan fell through in a
most lamentable way, and the Prince of Orange as a claimant to the Dutch
Government disappeared from further view until many years later.
The great bugaboo of the Provisional government and its moderate members
was the radical brethren of the very same Patriotic party. These good
people had starved abroad for many years. At the first opportunity they
had hastened back to the ancestral hearth-stone. And now they presented
enormous claims for damages for the losses which eight years before they
had suffered at the hands of the Orangeists. But instead of receiving
the hoped-for bounties these faithful democrats were snubbed on all
sides. The climax was reached when the Batavian Government offered to
pay them twenty-five guilders each (the price of a ticket from Paris to
Amsterdam) and let it go at that. The professional exiles roared
indignation, repaired to the nearest coffee-house, and instantly formed
a number of clubs which were to see that no further deviations from the
genuine path of revolutionary virtue be permitted. And very broadly they
hinted that a short session of Madame Guillotine might do no end of good
in this complacent and ungrateful Dutch community.
Let it be said to the everlasting honour of the Provisionals that no
such thing occurred. Nobody was decapitated, no palaces and country
houses were delivered to the tender mercies of the Jacobin Patriots.
The possessions of the Stadholder, which yielded 700,000 livres a year,
were taken over by the republic and administered for its own benefit.
The regents were permitted to exist, very, very quietly, and were not
interfered with in any way. Yea, even when old Van den Spiegel and
William's great friend Count Bentinck were brought to trial for
malfeasance committed while in office they were immediately set free.
And the citizen who conducted the investigation, Valckenaer by name and
a most ardent Jacobin by profession, openly confessed that there had
been no case against these two dignitaries, that the charges against
them had been like spinach: "Looks like a lot when it is fresh, but does
not make much of a dish when it gets boiled down."
No, the members of the Provisional were good Patriots and good
democrats, but with all due respect for the doctrine of equality they
did not aspire to that particular form of equality which is established
by the revolutionary razor.
But after the question of the more turbulent members of their party had
been decided, there was another problem of the greatest importance.
Where, in the name of all the depleted treasuries, could the money be
found with which to pay the French deliverers, the current expenses of
this costly provisional government, the added sums necessary for the war
with the enemies of France? The high sea was closed to Dutch trade, the
colonies did not produce a penny's worth of revenue, Dutch industries
were dead and buried under unpayable debts. Not a cent was coming in
from anywhere; but whole streams of valuable guilders were flowing out
of the country to everywhere.
The final solution of the problem was as simple as it was disastrous.
The Batavian Republic began to live on the capital of the Dutch
Republic. In some provinces the Provisional government confiscated all
gold and silver with the exception of the plate used in the church
service. But this little sum was gobbled up by the hungry treasury
before a month was over. Then voluntary 5 per cent. loans were tried.
They were not taken up. An extraordinary tax of 6 per cent. was levied
upon all revenue. The money covered the running expenses for three
weeks; and all the time those twenty-five thousand Frenchmen, who had to
be clothed and fed, ate and ate and ate as if they had never seen a
square meal before, which probably was the truth.
There was only one way out of the difficulty: The credit of the prodigal
son, who for two centuries had regularly paid his bills, is apt to be
good. The republic could loan as much as it wanted to, and it now abused
this privilege. Loans were taken to pay dividends upon other loans,
until finally a system was developed of loans within loans upon other
loans which ultimately must ruin even the soundest of financial
constitutions.
Meanwhile it poured assignats. All attempts to stop this unwelcome
shower at its source were met with the most absolute refusal of the
French Government. "What! dishonour our pretty greenbacks with their
fine mottoes, and accepted everywhere as the true badges of good
revolutionary faith?" They could not hear of such a thing. And they
printed assignats, and the counterfeiters printed assignats, and every
private citizen whose children owned a little private printing press and
whose oldest boy knew the rudiments of drawing printed assignats, until
the shower caused a deluge, which in due time swamped the whole
financial district and brought about that horror of horrors--a national
bankruptcy.
Enters No. 3 upon the program of the Provisional's difficulties: the
army and the navy.
Daendels had obtained permission to leave the French service and had
assumed command of the Dutch troops. A strange conglomeration of
troops, by the way, not unlike the mercenary armies of the Middle Ages:
regiments composed of every nationality--Swiss grenadiers and Saxon
cavalry, Scotch life guards and Mecklenburg chasseurs, a few Dutch
engineers and some Waldeck infantry; the officers partly Dutch, but
mostly foreign; the higher officers mostly in exile; the lower ones
awaiting the day when their friend the Prince should return. Surely
before this army could be reorganized into a national army of 24,000
well-equipped men, hot-blooded Daendels would have a chance to exercise
that swift temper of his. For after a year of drilling there was not
even a single company that could be depended upon in a regular skirmish
in time of war.
With the fleet the government did not experience such very great
difficulties. The fifteen millions necessary for reorganization had been
quickly collected, and Paulus a specialist on this subject, had gone to
work with a will. The old officers and men had either left the service,
or had surrendered their ships to the English as the allies of their
commander-in-chief, the Stadholder. But there were enough sailors in the
country to man the ships. Such of the old ships as had remained in Dutch
harbours were rebaptized with more appropriate names--the _William the
Silent_ became the _Brutus_, the _Estates General_ was renamed the
_George Washington_, and the _Princess Wilhelmina_ was delicately
changed to the _Fury_--and twenty-four new ships of the line and
twenty-four frigates were planned for immediate construction.
[Illustration: CAPETOWN CAPTURED BY THE ENGLISH]
After half a year Admiral de Winter (former second lieutenant of the
navy and French general of infantry) was ready to leave Texel with the
first Batavian fleet. He sailed from Texel with a couple of ships, and
after having been beaten by an English squadron off the coast of Norway,
he returned to Texel with a few ships less. Two special squadrons were
then equipped and ordered to proceed to the West and East Indian
Colonies; but before they left the republic news was received of the
conquest of these colonies by the British, and the auxiliary squadrons
were given up as useless.
Now all these puzzling questions facing untrained politicians took so
much of their time that nothing was apparently done toward the great
goal of this entire revolution--the establishment of a national assembly
to draw up a constitution and put the country upon a definite legitimate
basis.
The country began to show a certain restlessness. The old Orangeists
smiled. "They knew what all this desultory business meant. Provisional,
indeed? Provisional for all times." The more extreme Patriots, who knew
how sedition of this sort was preached all over the land, showed signs
of irritation. "It was not good that the opposition could say such
things. Something must be done and be done at once. Would the
Provisional kindly hurry?"
But when the Provisional did not hurry, and when nothing was done toward
a materialization of the much-heralded constitution, the Jacobins
bethought themselves of what they had learned in their Parisian boarding
school and decided to start a lobby--a revolutionary lobby, if you
please; not a peaceful one which works in the dark and follows the evil
paths of free cigars and free meals and free theatre tickets. No, a
lobby with a recognized standing, a clubhouse visible to all, and rules
and by-laws and a well-trained army of retainers to be drawn upon
whenever noise and threats could influence the passing of a particular
bill.
On the 26th of August, 1795, there assembled in The Hague more than
sixty representatives from different provincial patriotic clubs. The
purpose of the meeting was "to obtain a national assembly for the
formation of a constitution based upon the immovable rights of
men--Liberty and Equality--and having as its direct purpose the absolute
unity of this good land." Here at last was a program which sounded like
something definite--"the absolute unity of this land."
All the revolutionary doings of the last six months, the patriotic
turbulences of the past generation, were not as extreme, as
anti-nationalistic in their outspoken tendencies, as was this one
sentence: "The absolute unity of this land." It meant "Finis" to all the
exaggerated provincialism of the old republic. It meant an end to all
that for many centuries had been held most sacred by the average
Hollander. It meant that little potentates would no longer be little
potentates, but insignificant members of a large central government. It
meant that the little petty rights and honours for which whole families
had worked during centuries would pale before the lustre of the central
government in the capital. It meant that all High and Mightinesses would
be thrown into one general melting-pot to be changed into fellow
citizens of one undivided country. It meant the disappearance of that
most delightful of all vices, the small-town prejudice. And all those
who had anything to lose, from the highest regent down to the lowest
village lamplighter, made ready to offer silent but stubborn resistance.
To give up your money and your possessions was one thing, but to be
deprived of all your little prerogatives was positively unbearable. And
not a single problem with which the Provisional, or afterward the
national assembly, had to deal, caused as many difficulties as the
unyielding opposition of all respectable citizens to the essentially
outlandish plan of a single and undivided country.
As a matter of fact, the unity was finally forced upon the country by a
very small minority. The Dutch Jacobins were noisy, they were
ill-mannered, and on the whole they were not very sympathetic. (Jacobins
rarely are except on the stage.) But one thing they did, and they did it
well. By hook and by crook, by bullying, and upon several occasions by
direct threats of violence, they cut the Gordian knot of provincialism
and established a single nation and a union where formerly
disorganization and political chaos had existed. For when their first
proposal of the 26th of August was not at once welcomed by the
Provisional, the revolutionary lobbyists declared themselves to be a
permanent Supervisory Committee, and as the "Central Assembly" (of the
representatives from among the democratic clubs of the Batavian
Republic) they remained in The Hague agitating for their ideas until at
last something of positive value had been accomplished.
The Estates General could refuse to receive communications from this
self-appointed advisory body, the Estates of a number of provinces could
threaten its members with arrest, but here they were and here they
stayed (in an excellent hotel, by the way, which still exists and is now
known as the Vieux Doelen), sitting as an unofficial little parliament,
and fighting with all legitimate and illegitimate means for the
fulfilment of their self-imposed task. And one year and one month after
the glorious revolution which we have tried to describe in our previous
chapters, the provisional assembly, under the influence of these ardent
Patriots and their gallery crowd, decided to call together a "national
assembly to draw up a constitution and to take the first steps toward
changing the fatherland into a united country."
And this is the way they went about it: The national assembly should be
elected by all Hollanders who were twenty years of age. They must be
neither paupers nor heretics upon the point of the people's sovereignty.
For the purpose of the first election, the provinces were to be divided
into districts of 15,000 men each, subdivided into sub-districts of
500. The sub-districts, voting secretly and by majority of votes, were
to elect one elector and one substitute elector. The elector must be
twenty-five years of age, not a pauper, and a citizen of four years'
standing. Thirty electors then were to elect one representative and two
substitute representatives. These must be thirty years of age and were
to represent the people in the national assembly. Their pay was to be
four dollars a day and mileage. The national convention was to be an
executive and legislative body after the fashion of the Estates General
during those old days when no Stadholder had been appointed. Within two
weeks after its first meeting the national assembly must appoint a
suitable commission of twenty-one members (seven from Holland, one from
Drenthe, and two from each of the other provinces). Said commission,
within six months of date, must draw up a constitution. This
constitution then must at once be submitted to the convention for its
approval, and within a year it must be brought before the people for
their final referendum.
The elections actually took place in the last part of February of the
year 1796. They took place in perfect order and with great dignity. The
system was not exactly simple, but it was something new, and it was
rather fun to study out the complicated details and then walk to the
polls and exercise your first rights as a full-fledged citizen.
On the 1st of March more than half of the representatives, duly
elected, assembled in The Hague, ready to go to work.
A year had now gone by since the provisional government had been
started--a year which had little to show for itself except an
ever-increasing number of debts and an ever-decreasing amount of
revenue. The time had come for the direct representatives of the
sovereign people to indicate the new course which inevitably must bring
to the country the definite benefits of its glorious but expensive
revolution.
Exit the provisional assembly and enter the national assembly.
V