Here was a splendid dream of a rejuvenated country eagerly striving to
regain its lost importance. But a milkman who comes around once in every
seven years will lose his customers. And the Dutch trader, who as the
common carrier and the middleman had been for many centuries as regular
in the performances of his duties as the useful baker and butcher and
grocer of our own domestic acquaintance, found when he came back after
half a dozen years that his customers, tired of waiting for him, had
gone for their daily needs to a rival and did not contemplate a return
to a tradesman who had neglected them during so many years. And when the
ships which for seven years had been rotting in the harbours had been
sufficiently repaired to venture forth upon the seas, and when they had
gathered a cargo of sorts, there was no one to whom they could go to
sell their wares.
In the fall of the Dutch Republic we have tried to describe how,
gradually, the Hollander lost his markets. This chapter upon our
economic condition during the Batavian Republic can be very short. We
shall have to describe how, driven out of the legitimate trade, the
Dutch shipper entered the wide field of illegitimate business
enterprises until at last he disappeared entirely from a field of
endeavour in which honesty is not only the best policy but is also the
only policy which sooner or later does not lead to ruin. The large
commercial houses, of course, could stand several years of depression,
but the smaller fry, the humbler brethren who had always kept themselves
going on a little floating capital, these were soon obliged either to go
out of existence altogether or to enter upon some illicit affair. Quite
naturally they chose the latter course, and soon they found themselves
in that vast borderland of commerce where honesty merely consists in not
being found out.
[Illustration: THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY]
At first they traded under neutral flags and with neutral papers. But
the British during the prolonged war with France did not stick too
closely to international law, and every ship that was under suspicion of
not being a bona-fide foreign ship, but a Dutch ship under disguise, was
confiscated, taken to England, and there publicly sold. Every variation
upon the wide subject of fake papers, fake passports, and counterfeit
sailing-orders was tried, but invariably these ingenious schemes were
discovered by the British policemen who controlled the high seas, and
finally this commerce had to be given up entirely as being too risky.
Then all sorts of even more wonderful plans were developed by the
diligent Dutch traders. Here is a scheme at once so brilliant and so
simple that we must relate it:
Messrs. A. and B., honourable merchants from Amsterdam, enter into a
partnership. A. goes to London and as an Englishman enters business. B.
stays at home. A. equips a privateer. B. loads a ship and gets as much
insurance as he possibly can. The ship of B. leaves the Dutch harbour
and is captured by the ship of A. It is taken to England and ship and
cargo are publicly sold. A. gets the profits of his buccaneering
expedition. B. collects the insurance. The partners have in this way
made twice the amount of their original investment, minus the
insignificant loss on the ship. At the end of the year the two merchants
divide the spoils and both get rich. This method had the disadvantage of
being too easy. A deadly competition set in. Finally the insurance
companies discovered the swindle and refused to insure. That stopped the
business.
From that moment on the only way of doing business across the water was
to take the risk of capture, to try to run the blockade of the British
fleet in the North Seas and reach some safe foreign port. When the year
1801 came hardly a dozen ships which flew the Dutch flag dared to cross
the ocean. Not a single whaler was seen off the coast of Greenland; the
Dutch fishermen had deserted the North Sea; the channel was closed to
Dutch trade; the Mediterranean, where once Dutch had been a commonly
understood language, did not see any Dutch ships for many years; the
Baltic, the scene of the first Dutch commercial triumphs, no longer
witnessed the appearance of the Dutch grain carrier who during so many
centuries had provided the daily bread for millions of people. This
disappearance of the commercial fleet meant the absolute ruin of many
industries which up to that time had been kept alive by such demand as
there was for planed wood, nets, rope, tar, and the countless things
which went into the making of the old sailing-ship. The eighteenth
century had been a bad period for these industries. The beginning
nineteenth century killed them. The great manufacturing centres like
Leiden and Haarlem became the famous _villes mortes_ about which we like
to read, but in which we do not care to live. Hollow streets, grass
growing between the cobblestones, a few old families slowly dwindling
away and using up the funds of former generations; a population ill fed
and badly housed, physically degenerating and morally perishing under
the load of philanthropy by which it was kept alive; the whole life of
the city, once exuberant and open, retiring to the back room where the
sinful world cannot be seen; where, around the family tea table, and
with the patriarchal pipe, dull resignation is found in that same Bible
which once, and not so many years before, had inspired their ancestors
to a display of vitality and of energetic enterprise which has been
unsurpassed in European history. All optimism gone to make place for a
leaden despondency and a feeling that no attempt of the individual can
avail against the higher decrees of a cruel Providence. It is a terrible
picture. It remained true for almost three generations. Let us be
grateful that we in our own day have seen the last of it.
[Illustration: DUTCH SHIPS FROZEN IN THE ICE]
In the colonies, as has been said before, the same state of ruin existed
as at home. The West India Company had been bankrupt for almost a score
of years. The colonies in South America, the rich sugar plantations for
which once we sacrificed the unprofitable harbour of New York, were in
the year 1801 being worked for the benefit of the British conqueror.
Holland had lost them and had lost their profits. In the year 1798, by
article 247 of the first constitution, the East India Company had been
suspended. This enormous commercial institution, which with a minimum of
effort had produced a maximum of results, went out of existence like a
candle. Her loss was a terrible blow to Amsterdam. During the last
years, when the affairs of the company were going from bad to worse,
many loans had been taken up to meet the current expenses. Amsterdam,
which had the greatest interest in hiding the actual condition of the
company, had invariably provided these loans. Its City Bank still had an
inexhaustible supply of cash, but with her trade in foreign securities
ruined by the long wars, and her trade in domestic securities destroyed
by the demise of Dutch manufacturing and Dutch shipping, with the
enormous international banking business made impossible by the unsettled
conditions of the revolutionary wars, the bank could only be maintained
by very doubtful financial expedients. And when this pillar of Dutch
society began to tremble upon its foundations, which were no longer
sound, what was to become of the Dutch banks?
Failures of large commercial houses became disastrously frequent. Each
failure in turn affected larger circles of business institutions. Even
the expedient of using some of the ancestral capital became difficult
where there was no market for the securities which the people wished to
sell. Dividends upon foreign securities were passed year after year;
taxes went up higher every six months. Such a long siege upon its
prosperity no country could stand. And while the people were thus being
impoverished, what did the government and what did the French allies do
to bring about some improvement? France did nothing at all. The Dutch
Government sometimes sent a mild protest to London and asked the British
Government not to confiscate ships under a neutral flag, protestations
which of course remained unanswered.
[Illustration: BATAVIA--THE FASHIONABLE QUARTER]
Here is another little sum in arithmetic which will explain more than a
lengthy disputation upon the subject of our national ruin. It is a list
of the current expenses and revenues for a number of years: