LEYDEN'S UNIVERSITY, HAARLEM'S FLOWERS, AND AMSTERDAM'S COMMERCE.
UTRECHT, _October 25, 1902_.
We gave only one day to Leyden, ten miles from The Hague, but it was
one of the most interesting days we have had in Europe. Taking a guide
at the railway station, we traversed the quaint streets and crossed and
recrossed the multitudinous canals, and climbed to the top of the great
fortified circular mound of earth in the centre of the city, called the
_Burg_, the foundations of which date from the tenth century, and from
the top of which we had a unique view of the heroic old town and the
peaceful homes of its fifty-four thousand people.
[Sidenote: The Great Siege.]
But one does not go far in Leyden without being reminded of the
terrible siege to which it was subjected by the Spaniards in 1574. One
such reminder is the bronze statue of the gallant Mayor Van der Werf,
who defended the city in that siege and would listen to no suggestion
of surrender. Another is an inscription on the front of the Stadhuis,
which, translated, reads: "When the black famine had brought to the
death nearly six thousand persons, then God the Lord repented and gave
us bread again as much as we could wish"; and which in the original
Dutch is an ingenious chronogram, the capital letters as Roman numerals
giving the date, and the one hundred and thirty-one letters used in
the original indicating the number of days during which the siege
lasted. But, after a short and partial relief, the siege was continued
in the form of a blockade for many dreadful months. William of
Orange finally cut the dykes and flooded the country, and relieved the
famished city by ships.
[Illustration: A STRANGER IN LEYDEN.]
[Sidenote: A Unique Reward of Valor.]
The story of Leyden which made the deepest impression upon me as a
boy was that of William's offering to reward the citizens for this
gallant defence either by exempting them from taxes for a certain
number of years or by the establishment of a university in their city.
To their everlasting honor they chose the latter, even in that time
of distress and poverty, and the University was founded in 1575. Of
course we wished to see the University which had such a history as
that, to say nothing of the fact that we had heard of Leyden jars ever
since we began the study of electricity at college, and that we knew
something of a few of the men whose genius has at different periods
since made the faculty one of the most illustrious in Europe, such as
"the learned Scaliger," the famous physician Boerhaave, Arminius and
Gomar, champions, respectively, of the two theological schools known as
Arminians or Remonstrants and Calvinists, which in 1618 brought their
differences to debate in the famous Synod of Dort; and, as is always
the case when an opportunity for thorough discussion on the basis
of Scripture is given, the result was a victory for the Calvinists.
We remembered also with pleasure that Oliver Goldsmith, author of
the immortal _Vicar of Wakefield_, was for a time a student at the
University of Leyden; and we recalled with less pleasure that in our
own day the faculty of the institution had furnished one of the boldest
advocates of the destructive criticism of the Old Testament, Professor
Abraham Kuenen.
[Sidenote: Plain College Buildings Abroad.]
It was a satisfaction to see it, though there is little to see;
this University, like most of those on the continent, having very
indifferent buildings and appointments. The men who sometimes "kick"
in American colleges and seminaries because the class-rooms and
dormitories do not suit them, to say nothing of their board, would get
a superabundance of that sort of exercise if they had to attend the
average Dutch or German university. In fact, it has been intimated
at times that there are men in American colleges and seminaries who
belong to that class of people of whom it was suggested that they
would grumble even after getting to heaven on the ground that their
haloes didn't fit. Fortunately, however, these are very few, the great
majority of our American students being not spoiled and fussy children,
but manly, sensible, hard working, plain living, high thinking men.
[Sidenote: John Robinson and the Pilgrim Fathers.]
Before leaving Leyden we made a point of visiting the house in which
the Rev. John Robinson lived. He was the leader of the first Puritans
who were banished from England, and who, like the adherents of every
other persecuted faith, found toleration and liberty in Calvinistic
Holland. A bronze tablet affixed to the wall of the church on the
opposite side of the street contains a bas-relief of the _Mayflower_,
and states that it was at Mr. Robinson's prompting that the Pilgrim
Fathers went forth to settle New England in 1620.
[Sidenote: Horse Flesh as Food.]
As we passed with our guide through what looked like an open-air beef
market, he surprised us not a little by telling us that what the people
were buying there was not beef, but horse flesh, which is much cheaper,
adding that the worn-out dray horses and car horses of the English
cities were regularly bought and shipped to Holland to be sold to the
poor instead of beef. No doubt the people of Leyden became accustomed
to much worse fare than that when, during the great siege of 1574,
the Spaniards were trying to starve them into resubmission to Roman
Catholicism. But those conditions no longer exist, and the idea of
eating horse flesh as a regular thing is not one which commends itself
to our feelings.
[Sidenote: Haarlem.]
This place, seventeen miles from Leyden, also had experience of the
tender mercies of the papal soldiery when, in 1573, after a gallant
defence of seven months, it fell into the hands of the Spaniards, and
the entire garrison, the Protestant ministers of the gospel, and two
thousand of the townspeople were executed. Haarlem is now, and has
been for two hundred and fifty years, famous for its horticulture.
It supplies bulbs to every part of the world, and in the spring the
nurseries around the city are ablaze with the brilliant blooms of
the tulips, hyacinths, crocuses and lilies, whole fields of them in
every variety of color, like vast natural flags of the brightest hues,
lying on the flat surface of the country, and the whole atmosphere is
impregnated with their delicious fragrance.
[Sidenote: A Flower Boom.]
Two centuries and a half ago, at the time of the "Tulip Mania," there
was as wild speculation in bulbs as there has ever been in our day in
stocks. Enormous prices were paid for the rarer bulbs. For instance, a
single bulb of the species called "Semper Augustus" was sold for five
thousand two hundred dollars. This statement will not seem incredible
to any of my readers who have had bitter experience with the fictitious
values created by the "booms" which cursed and crippled so many of our
Southern communities a few years ago. The tulip craze in Holland had
the same history: the mania subsided, the prices fell, many of the
speculators were ruined, and before long a "Semper Augustus" could be
bought for twenty dollars. Even that will seem to most people a pretty
high price for a single tulip bulb.
[Sidenote: A Small Country.]
We did not stop at Haarlem, as it was not the right season for the
gorgeous display of flowers above referred to, that is, the latter part
of April and the beginning of May, but pushed on to Amsterdam, which is
only ten miles away. If the reader has taken account of the distances
between these populous cities as they have been successively mentioned,
and has observed how short they are, he will have received a very
strong impression of the smallness of the country.
[Sidenote: Amsterdam.]
Amsterdam, the largest city in Holland, with a population of more than
half a million, is built upon nearly a hundred islands, separated from
one another by a network of canals and connected by means of some three
hundred bridges, and is, therefore, sometimes spoken of as "a vulgar
Venice," but, with its prodigious vitality, its crowded streets, its
busy waters, and its financial eminence, it must be far more like the
Venice which was Queen of the Adriatic some centuries ago than the
stagnant and melancholy town which bears that name to-day.
[Sidenote: Odoriferous Canals.]
The water in the canals is about three feet deep, and below this is
a layer of mud of the same thickness. It is said that, in order to
prevent malarial exhalations, the water is constantly renewed from an
arm of the North Sea Canal and the mud removed by dredging. I hope this
process is effective, but there were unmistakable exhalations from the
canals when we were there. Whether they were malarial or not I cannot
say, but certainly they were unfragrant to a degree. Still, the evil
smells of Amsterdam are not to be named in number and vigor with those
of Venice.
[Sidenote: A City Built on Stakes.]
As in Venice, so here, all the houses are built on piles which are
driven fifteen or twenty feet through the loose sand near the surface
into the firmer layers below. Hence the jest of Erasmus, that he knew
a city whose inhabitants dwelt on the tops of trees like rooks. They
are not so secure on their perch, however, as the rooks. For, although
the preparations underground are often more costly than the buildings
afterwards erected above, yet, such is the difficulty of securing
a firm foundation, and such the ravages of the wood worm among the
fir-tree piles after they are driven into the sand and built upon, that
many of the brick houses which were once erect are now considerably
out of the perpendicular, and lean backwards or forwards or sideways,
according as the piles have given way at one place or another. In 1822
thirty-four hundred tons of grain were stored in a grain magazine
originally built for the East India Company, and, the piles being
unable to sustain the weight, the building literally sank down into the
mud.
[Sidenote: The Business of Amsterdam.]
Besides its importance as a mart for the tobacco, sugar, rice, spices,
and other produce of the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, West Indies
and South America (which, by the way, have a population of thirty-five
million, that is, seven times as many as the little mother country),
Amsterdam has a number of important industrial establishments, such
as ship-yards, sugar and camphor refineries, cobalt-blue and candle
factories, machine shops, breweries, and especially diamond-polishing
mills, of which last there are no less than seventy, employing in all
about ten thousand men. We visited one of these mills and watched the
process for a few minutes.
[Sidenote: The Jewish Quarter.]
The art of polishing diamonds was introduced here in the sixteenth
century by Portuguese Jews, who, driven from their former homes by
papal persecution, found in Protestant Holland an asylum, and, like
the oppressed adherents of other creeds, secured the full religious
toleration which they craved. They have ever since constituted an
important part of the population of Amsterdam, and now number about
thirty-five thousand. One of the interesting episodes of our visit was
a drive through the poorer Jewish Quarter, with its swarms of untidy
men, women and children. In this quarter and of this stock Spinoza, the
philosopher, was born; and in this quarter, though not of this stock,
Rembrandt, the painter, lived for fifteen years, in a house marked by a
tablet, which those who are specially interested in art always wish to
see.
[Sidenote: Home of President Kruger.]
Utrecht, twenty-two miles from Amsterdam, is an attractive city of one
hundred thousand inhabitants. It interested us chiefly as the centre
of the Jansenists, the redoubtable Roman Catholic adversaries of the
Jesuits, and as the peaceful home of ex-President Kruger since his
withdrawal from the stormy experiences of his life in South Africa.
This venerable man, so remarkable on account of his public career,
is of special interest to any one connected with Union Seminary in
Virginia, because it was under the ministry of a former student of our
Seminary, the late Dr. Daniel Lindley, who went as a missionary to
South Africa more than sixty years ago, that Mr. Kruger was brought
into the church. He lives in great comfort on the famous Malieban,
which, with its triple row of lime trees, is one of the loveliest
residential districts in Europe.
[Sidenote: Queer Customs in Holland.]
It seems odd that in a country where there is so much water, there
should be so little that is fit to drink, and that in a country where
land is so valuable the people should use any part of it for fuel, and
yet, not only does one constantly see dog-carts containing barrels of
fresh water and loads of peat passing hither and thither in the towns,
but at cellar doors in the side streets sign-boards are seen announcing
"water and fire to sell," and at these places the poorer classes buy
the boiling water or red-hot turf that they need to make their tea or
coffee. Foot-warmers are very generally used by the Dutch women, and in
some of the churches we saw immense numbers of these little fireboxes.
[Sidenote: The Comfort of a Hot Water Bottle.]
This reminds me to say, for the benefit of any of my readers who may
be planning a trip to Europe, that two things are more conducive to
comfort and health than a good hot-water bottle when one is travelling
in Northern or Central Europe, for these lands are much colder than
ours in spring, summer and autumn, and arrangements for heating the
hotels either do not exist or are utterly ineffective. American
tourists who do not observe this precaution are likely to need physic,
and, by the way, the universal sign for drug stores in Holland is not
the mortar and pestle, but "the gaper," that is, a painted Turk's head
showing his tongue.
[Sidenote: Domestic Store-rooms in the Top Stories.]
In Amsterdam and other Dutch cities many of the houses, which are made
of brick with light colored painting and have a very substantial and
neat appearance, are narrow and high, standing with ornamented gable
ends to the street, and have beams projecting from the gables with
fixtures for hoisting goods to the top stories, which are used for
store-rooms. These are not business houses, but dwelling houses of
people well to do, and the windows and woodwork from top to bottom are
scrupulously clean and bright.
[Sidenote: The Original "Spotless Town."]
Broeck, in the north of Holland, is said to be the original Spotless
Town. We did not visit this place, but it is thus described by a writer
in _Public Opinion_ who has done so:
"The palings of the fences of Broeck are sky-blue. The streets are
paved with shining bricks of many colors. The houses are rose-colored,
black, gray, purple, light blue or pale green. The doors are painted
and gilded. For hours you may not see a soul in the streets or at the
windows. The streets and houses, bridges, windows and barns show a
neatness and a brilliancy that are absolutely painful.
"At every step a new effect is disclosed, a new scene is beheld, as
if painted upon the drop-curtain of a stage. Everything is minute,
compact, painted, spotless and clean. In the houses of Broeck
for cleaning purposes you will find big brooms, little brooms,
tooth-brushes, aqua fortis, whiting for the window panes, rouge for
the forks and spoons, coal dust for the copper, emery for the iron
utensils, brick powder for the floors, and even small splinters of wood
with which to pick out the tiny bits of straw in the cracks between the
bricks. Here are some of the rules of this wonderful town:
"Citizens must leave their shoes at the door when entering a house.
"Before or after sunset no one is allowed to smoke excepting with a
pipe having a cover, so that the ashes will not be scattered upon the
street.
"Any one crossing the village on horseback must get out of the saddle
and lead the horse.
"A cuspidor shall be kept by the front door of each house.
"It is forbidden to cross the village in a carriage, or to drive
animals through the streets."
Thus, it appears that "Spotless Town" is not merely an ideal existing
in the imagination of the man who writes the very clever verses
placarded in our street-cars and elsewhere in praise of the cleansing
properties of Sapolio, but a reality; and there are numerous places in
Holland which in point of cleanliness would put to shame any of our
American towns.
[Sidenote: A Pardonable Mania.]
Some one has said that the Dutch love of cleanliness amounts almost
to a monomania, and that the washing, scrubbing and polishing to
which every house is subjected once every week is rather subversive
of comfort. And it would appear from the regulations above cited that
the matter is sometimes pushed to extremes. But my experience as a
traveller in some parts of my own country, as well as in some parts of
other lands, has made me very tolerant of such a mania as that, and,
when amid the filth of Venice or Naples, for instance, my mind has
reverted to these clean Dutch towns, it has caused me to sigh--"_O si
sic omnes!_"
[Sidenote: Mr. Edward Bok on the "Mother of America."]
I cannot resist the temptation to append to these letters about little,
quaint, clean, energetic, heroic, learned, unpretentious Holland some
extracts from an article of Mr. Edward Bok's which I have read since
my return to America. He refers to the fact that twenty thousand more
American travellers are said to have visited the Netherlands during
the past summer than in any previous year, and to the fact that
there is a rapidly increasing demand for books on the history of the
Dutch people, as shown by the reports of the librarians in American
towns, and he regards these as specimens of a group of facts which,
taken together, indicate clearly that the reading world of America is
beginning to appreciate the real extent of the strong Dutch influences
which underlie American institutions and have shaped American life.
He says that for years we have written in our histories and taught
in our schools that this nation is a transplanted England; that the
institutions which have made this country distinctively great were
derived from England. But he denies that England is entitled to this
honor, and declares that the true mother land of America is not
England, but Holland:
"Take, for instance, what may be truly designated as the four vital
institutions upon which America not only rests, but which have caused
it to be regarded as the most distinctive nation in the world. I mean
our public-school system of free education; our freedom of religious
worship; our freedom of the press; and our freedom of suffrage as
represented by the secret ballot. Not one of these came from England,
since not one of them existed there when they were established in
America; in fact, only one of them existed in England earlier than
fifty years after they existed in America, and the other three did
not exist in England until nearly one hundred years after their
establishment in America. Each and all of these four institutions came
to America directly from Holland. Take the two documents upon which the
whole fabric of the establishment and maintenance of America rests--the
Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution of the United
States--and one, the Declaration, is based almost entirely upon the
Declaration of Independence of the United Republic of the Netherlands;
while all through the Constitution its salient points are based upon,
and some literally copied from, the Dutch Constitution. So strong
is this Netherland influence upon our American form of government
that the Senate of the United States, as a body, derives most of the
peculiarities of its organization from the Netherlands States General,
a similar body, and its predecessor by nearly a century of years, while
even in the American flag we find the colors and the five-pointed star
chosen from the Dutch.
"The common modern practice of the State allowing a prisoner the free
services of a lawyer for his defence, and the office of a district
attorney for each county, are so familiar to us that we regard them as
American inventions. Both institutions have been credited to England,
whereas, as a matter of fact, it is impossible to find in England even
to-day any official corresponding to our district attorney. Both of
these institutions existed in Holland three centuries before they were
brought to America.
"The equal distribution of property among the children of a person
dying intestate--that is, without a will--was brought to America direct
from Holland by the Puritans. It never existed in England.
"The record of all deeds and mortgages in a public office, a custom
which affects every man and woman who owns or buys property, came to
America direct from Holland. It never came from England, since it does
not exist there even at the present day.
"The township system, by which each town has local self-government,
with its natural sequence of local self-government in county and State,
came from Holland.
"The practice of making prisoners work, and turning prisons into
workhouses, and, in fact, our whole modern American management of
free prisons which has caused the admiration of the entire world, was
brought from Holland to America by William Penn.
"Group these astonishing facts together, if you will, and see
their tremendous import: The Federal Constitution; the Declaration
of Independence; the whole organization of the Senate; our State
Constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free schools; our
free press; our written ballot; our town, county and State systems
of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages;
the giving of every criminal a just chance for his life; a public
prosecutor of crime in every county; our free prison workhouse
system--to say nothing of kindred important and vital elements in our
national life. When each and all of these can be traced directly to
one nation, or to the influence of that nation, and that nation not
England, is it any wonder, asks one enlightened historian, that some
modern scholars, who, looking beneath the mere surface resemblance of
language, seek an explanation of the manifest difference between the
people of England and the people of the United States assumed by them
to be of the same blood, and influenced by the same (?) institutions?
"Nor is it strange that so strong a Dutch influence should have entered
into the establishment and making of America, when one considers the
immense debt which the world owes to Holland. For it may be said
without fear of contradiction that in nearly every art which uplifts
and adorns human life, in nearly every aspect of human endeavor,
Holland has not only added to the moral resources of mankind and
contributed more to the fabric of civilization, but has also actually
led the way. It was the first nation to master the soil and teach
agriculture to the world. It has taught the world the art of gardening.
It taught commerce and merchandise to the entire world when it ranked
as the only great commercial nation on the globe. It taught the
broadest lines of finance to the world by the establishment, in 1609,
of its great Bank of Amsterdam, with one hundred and eighty millions of
dollars deposits, preceding the establishment of the Bank of England
by nearly one hundred years. The founding of its great University of
Leyden, in 1575, marked an epoch in the world's history of education,
and made the Netherlands the centre of learning of Europe. Here was
founded international law through Grotius, one of Holland's greatest
sons. Here Boerhaave, a Dutchman, revolutionized medicine by his
wonderful discoveries until Holland's medical school became the seat of
authority for all Europe. From this centre, too, came that great lesson
in the publishing of books in the shape of the famous Elzevir books. It
was the first nation to place the reader and the spelling-book in the
hands of the child, irrespective of station or means. As musicians, for
nearly two hundred years the Netherlands stood supreme, and furnished
all the courts of Europe with vocal and instrumental music. It was the
Dutch who founded, in Naples, the first musical conservatory in the
world, and another in Venice, and it was to their influence and example
that the renowned school of Rome owed its existence.
"The starting of all these masterful influences would alone make
a nation great. But these were only a part of Holland's wonderful
contributions to the world's enlightenment. It went on and introduced
to the world the manufacture of woollen cloth that marked an epoch
in history, and followed this up by developing the manufacture of
silk, linen, tapestry and lace until it made its city of Flanders the
manufacturing centre of the world. It devised and presented through
the Van Eyck brothers the wonderful discovery of oil painting, and
revolutionized the world of art, and gave, in the person of one of
these brothers, Jan Van Eyck, the originator of the painted portrait.
Then came the invention of wood-engraving by a Dutchman, followed
quickly by the printing of books from blocks; the substitution
of movable type for the solid block of wood, and we have the
printing-press--the invention of which Germany may never concede to
Holland, and yet the germ of which lay in the block books to which
Holland lays unquestioned claim. But Holland need never squabble
over a single invention. A nation that, in addition to what has been
cited above, has likewise invented the telescope, the microscope, the
thermometer, the method of measuring degrees of latitude and longitude,
the pendulum clock, thereby putting before the world the beginning
of anything which we can call accuracy in time, and discovered the
capillary circulation of the blood, need not stop to split straws.
There is a wonderful charm in reading the history of a people who
have done so much toward the enlightenment of the world, and not
alone in one field of thought or activity, but in every field of
human endeavor. The people of no nation make so bold and strong an
impression on the mind as one after another of their achievements
pass before one, and especially when it is considered that all these
contributions to humankind were done with one hand while the other was
busy in saving every foot of land from the rushing waters. But the
people always remained cool, balanced and solid. That same patient but
deep, perfervid spirit which built the dykes and saved the land with
one hand, and opened those same dykes, built by the very life-blood of
the people, with the other, and flooded the land against encroaching
enemies--that same spirit built up a nation unrivalled in history as a
financial, commercial, maritime, art, learning, medical and political
centre, from which have radiated the strongest influences for the
upbuilding of great empires--not only in the new Western world of
America, but also in the far East of the Indies, and in the strong
colonial establishment of South Africa. Her glory may be of the past,
but he is indeed a rash prophet who would predict the future of any
nation, however small, on the face of the globe of to-day. Of some
things the American traveller is to-day constantly convinced: that
there is less intellectual veneer in Holland than in any other country
in Europe; that there is more solid and abiding culture of the very
highest kind, and that the modern Dutch family represents a repose of
mind, a simplicity of living, and a contented happiness with life in
general that we, as a nation, might well envy."