HOLLAND
NOTE ON LITERATURE
The special interest of Dutch history for English and other readers led
in past generations to a more general sociological study of it than was
given to almost any other. L. Guicciardini's _Description of the Low
Countries_ (_Descrizione ... di tutti Paesi Bassi_, etc., Anversa,
folio, 1567, 1581, etc.; trans. in French, 1568, etc.; in English, 1593;
in Dutch, 1582; in Latin, 1613, etc.) is one of the fullest surveys of
the kind made till recent times. Sir William Temple's _Observations upon
the United Provinces of the Netherlands_ (1672) laid for English readers
further foundations of an intelligent knowledge of the vital conditions
of the State which had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the great commercial rival of England; and in the eighteenth century
many English writers discussed the fortunes of Dutch commerce. An
English translation was made of the remarkably sagacious work variously
known as the _Memoirs of John de Witt_, the _True Interest of Holland_,
and _Political Maxims of the State of Holland_ (really written by De
Witt's friend, Pierre Delacourt; De Witt, however, contributing two
chapters), and much attention was given to it here and on the Continent.
In addition to the many and copious histories written in the eighteenth
century in Dutch, three or four voluminous and competent histories of
the Low Countries were written in French--_e.g._, those of Dujardin
(1757, etc., 8 vols. 4to), Cerisier (1777, etc., 10 vols. 12mo), Le
Clerc (1723-28, 3 vols. folio), Wicquefort (1719, folio, proceeding from
Peace of Muenster). Of late years, though the lesson is as important as
ever, it appears to be less generally attended to. In our own country,
however, have appeared Davies' _History of Holland_ (1841, 3 vols.), a
careful but not often an illuminating work, which oddly begins with the
statement that "there is scarcely any nation whose history has been so
little understood or so generally neglected as that of Holland"; T.
Colley Grattan's earlier and shorter book (_The Netherlands_, 1830),
which is still worth reading for a general view based on adequate
learning; and the much better known works of Motley, _The Rise of the
Dutch Republic_ (1856) and the _History of the United Netherlands_
(1861-68), which deal minutely with only a period of fifty-five years of
Dutch history, and of which, as of the work of Davies, the sociological
value is much below the annalistic. All three are impaired as literature
by their stale rhetoric. The same malady infects the second volume of
the _Industrial History of the Free Nations_ (1846), by W. Torrens
M'Cullagh (afterwards M'Cullagh Torrens); but this, which deals with
Holland, is the better section of that treatise, and it gives distinct
help to a scientific conception of the process of Dutch history, as does
J.R. M'Culloch's _Essay on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Commerce
in Holland_, which is one of the best of his _Essays and Treatises_ (2nd
ed. 1859). The _Holland_ of the late Professor Thorold Rogers has merit
as a vivacious conspectus, but hardly rises to the opportunity.
Of the many French, Belgian, and German works on special periods of the
history of the Low Countries, some have a special and general scientific
interest. Among these is the research of M. Alphonse Wauters on _Les
libertes communales_ (Bruxelles, 1878). Barante's _Histoire des Ducs de
Bourgogne_ (4th ed. 1838-40) contains much interesting matter on the
Burgundian period. The assiduous research of M. Lefevre Pontalis, _Jean
de Witt, Grand Pensionnaire de Hollande_ (2 tom. 1884; Eng. trans. 2
vols.), throws a full light on one of the most critical periods of Dutch
history.
Dutch works on the history of the Low Countries in general, and the
United Provinces in particular, are many and voluminous; indeed, no
history has been more amply written. The good general history of the
Netherlands by N.G. van Kampen, which appeared in German in the series
of Heeren and Uckert (1831-33), is only partially superseded by the
_Geschichte der Niederlande_ of Wenzelburger (Bd. i, 1879; ii, 1886),
which is not completed. But the most readable general history of the
Netherlands yet produced is that of P.J. Blok, _Geschiedenis van het
Nederlandsche Volk_ (1892, etc.), of which there is a competent but
unfortunately abridged English translation (Putnams, vol. i, 1898).
Standard modern Dutch works are those of J.A. Vijnne, _Geschiedenis van
het Vaderland_, and J. van Lennep, _De Geschiedenis van Nederland_. For
Belgian history in particular the authorities are similarly numerous.
The _Manuel de l'histoire de Belgique_, by J. David (Louvain, 1847),
will be found a good handbook of authorities, episodes, and chronology,
though without any sociological element. The _Histoire de Belgique_ of
Th. Juste (Bruxelles, 1895, 3 tom. 4to) is comprehensive, but disfigured
by insupportable illustrations.
Sec. 1. _The Rise of the Netherlands_
The case of Holland is one of those which at first sight seem to flout
the sociological maxim that civilisations flourish in virtue partly of
natural advantages and partly of psychological pressures. On the face of
things, it would seem that the original negation of natural advantage
could hardly be carried farther than here. A land pieced together out of
drained marshes certainly tells more of man's effort than of Nature's
bounty. Yet even here the process of natural law is perfectly sequent
and intelligible.
One of the least-noted influences of the sea on civilisation is the
economic basis it yields in the way of food-supply. Already in Caesar's
time the Batavians were partly fishermen; and it may be taken as certain
that through all the troubled ages down to the period of industry and
commerce it was the resource of fishing that mainly maintained and
retained population in the sea-board swamps of the Low Countries. Here
was a harvest that enemies could not destroy, that demanded no ploughing
and sowing, and that could not well be reaped by the labour of slaves.
When war and devastation could absolutely depopulate the cultivated
land, forcing all men to flee from famine, the sea for ever yielded some
return to him who could but get afloat with net or line; and he who
could sail the sea had a double chance of life and freedom as against
land enemies. Thus a sea marsh could be humanly advantaged as against a
fruitful plain, and could be a surer dwelling-place. The tables were
first effectually turned when the Norse pirates attacked from the
sea--an irresistible inroad which seems to have driven the sea-board
Frisians (as it did the coast inhabitants of France) in crowds into
slavery for protection, thus laying a broad foundation of popular
serfdom.[725] When, however, the Norse empire began to fail, the sea as
a source of sustenance again counted for civilisation; and when to this
natural basis of population and subsistence there was added the peculiar
stimulus set up by a religious inculcation or encouragement of a fish
diet, the fishing-grounds of the continent became relatively richer
estates than mines and vineyards. Venice and Holland alike owed much to
the superstition which made Christians akreophagous on Fridays and
fast-days and all through the forty days of Lent. When the plan of
salting herrings was hit upon,[726] all Christian Europe helped to make
the fortunes of the fisheries.
Net-making may have led to weaving; in any case weaving is the first
important industry developed in the Low Countries. It depended mainly on
the wool of England; and on the basis of the ancient seafaring there
thus arose a sea-going commerce.[727] Further, the position of
Flanders,[728] as a trade-centre for northern and southern Europe,
served to make it a market for all manner of produce; and round such a
market population and manufactures grew together. It belonged to the
conditions that, though the territory came under feudal rule like every
other in the medieval military period, the cities were relatively
energetic all along,[729] theirs being (after the Dark Ages, when the
work was largely done by the Church) the task of maintaining the
sea-dykes[730] and water-ways, and theirs the wealth on which alone the
feudal over-lords could hope to flourish in an unfruitful land. The
over-lords, on their part, saw the expediency of encouraging foreigners
to settle and add to their taxable population,[731] thus establishing
the tradition of political tolerance long before the Protestant period.
Hence arose in the Netherlands, after the Renaissance, the phenomenon of
a dense industrial population flourishing on a soil which finally could
not be made to feed them,[732] and carrying on a vast shipping trade
without owning a single good harbour and without possessing home-grown
timber wherewith to build their ships, or home-products to freight
them.[733]
One of the determinants of this growth on a partially democratic footing
was clearly the primary and peculiar necessity for combination by the
inhabitants to maintain the great sea-dykes, the canals, and the
embankments of the low-lying river-lands in the interior.[734] It was a
public bond in peace, over and above the normal tie of common enmities.
The result was a development of civic life still more rapid and more
marked in inland Flanders,[735] where the territorial feudal power was
naturally greater than in the maritime Dutch provinces. Self-ruling
cities, such as Ghent and Antwerp, at their meridian, were too powerful
to be effectively menaced by their immediate feudal lords. But on the
side of their relations with neighbouring cities or States they all
exhibited the normal foible; and it was owing only to the murderous
compulsion put upon them by Spain in the sixteenth century that any of
the provinces of the Netherlands became a federal republic. For five
centuries after Charlemagne, who subdued them to his system, the Low
Countries had undergone the ordinary slow evolution from pure feudalism
to the polity of municipalities. In the richer inland districts the
feudal system, lay and clerical, was at its height, the baronial castles
being "here more numerous than in any other part of Christendom";[736]
and when the growing cities began to feel their power to buy charters,
the feudal formula was unchallenged,[737] while the mass of the outside
population were in the usual "Teutonic" state of partial or complete
serfdom. It was only by burning their suburbs and taking to the walled
fortress that the people of Utrecht escaped the yoke of the
Norsemen.[738]
Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh is responsible for the statement that "it
seems doubtful whether any portion of the inhabitants of Holland
were ever in a state of actual servitude or bondage," and that the
northern provinces were more generally free from slavery than the
others (_Industrial History of the Free Nations_, 1846, ii, 39).
Motley (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, as cited, pp. 17, 18)
pronounces, on the contrary, that "in the northern Netherlands the
degraded condition of the mass continued longest," and that "the
number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the
number belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht enormous." This is
substantially borne out by Grattan, _Netherlands_, pp. 18, 34;
Blok, _Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk_, i, 159, 160,
305-11, Eng. tr. i, 203-8; Wauters, _Les libertes communales_,
1878, pp. 222-30. As is noted by Blok, the status of the peasantry
fluctuated, the thirteenth century being one of partial
retrogression. Cp. pp. 318, 319, as to the general depression of
the peasant class. The great impulse to slavery, as above noted,
seems to have been given by the Norse pirates in general and the
later Norman invaders, who, under Godfrey, forced every "free"
Frisian to wear a halter. The comparative protection accruing to
slaves of the Church was embraced by multitudes. In the time of the
Crusades, again, many serfs were sold or mortgaged to the Church by
the nobles in order to obtain funds for their expedition.
The cities were thus the liberating and civilising forces;[739] and the
application of townsmen's capital to the land was an early influence in
improving rural conditions.[740] But there was no escape from the
fatality of strife in the Teutonic any more than in the ancient Greek or
in the contemporary Italian world. Flanders, having the large markets of
France at hand, developed its clothmaking and other industries more
rapidly than the Frisian districts, where weaving was probably earlier
carried on;[741] and here serfdom disappeared comparatively early,[742]
the nobility dwindling through their wars; but the new industrial
strifes of classes, which grew up everywhere in the familiar fashion,
naturally matured the sooner in the more advanced civilisation; and
already at the beginning of the fourteenth century we find a resulting
disintegration. The monopoly methods of the trade gilds drove much of
the weaving industry into the villages; then the Franco-Flemish wars,
wherein the townspeople, by expelling the French in despite of the
nobility, greatly strengthened their position,[743] nevertheless tended,
as did the subsequent civil wars, to drive trade into South Brabant.
In Flemish Ghent and Bruges the clashing interests of weavers and
woollen-traders, complicated by the strife of the French (aristocratic)
and anti-French (popular) factions, led to riots in which citizens and
magistrates were killed (1301). At times these enmities reached the
magnitude of civil war. At Ypres (1303) a combination of workmen
demanded the suppression of rival industries in neighbouring villages,
and in an ensuing riot the mayor and all the magistrates were slain; at
Bruges (1302) a trade riot led to the loss of fifteen hundred
lives.[744] When later the weaving trade had flourished in Brabant, the
same fatality came about: plebeians rebelled against patrician
magistrates--themselves traders or employers of labour--in the principal
cities; and Brussels (1312) was for a time given up to pillage and
massacre, put down only by the troops of the reigning duke. A great
legislative effort was made in the "Laws of Cortenberg," framed by an
assembly of nobles and city deputies, to regulate fiscal and industrial
affairs in a stable fashion;[745] but after fifty years the trouble
broke out afresh, and was ill-healed.[746] At length, in a riot in the
rich city of Louvain (1379), sixteen of its patrician magistrates were
slain, whereupon many took flight to England, but many more to Haarlem,
Amsterdam, Leyden, and other Dutch cities.[747] Louvain never again
recovered its trade and wealth;[748] and since the renewed
Franco-Flemish wars of this period had nearly destroyed the commerce of
Flanders,[749] there was a general gravitation of both merchandise and
manufacture to Holland.[750] Thus arose Dutch manufactures in an organic
connection with maritime commerce, the Dutch municipal organisation
securing a balance of trade interests where that of the Flemish
industrial cities had partially failed.
The commercial lead given by the Hanseatic League was followed in the
Netherlands with a peculiar energy, and till the Spanish period the main
part of Dutch maritime commerce was with northern Europe and the Hansa
cities. So far as the language test goes, the original Hansards and the
Dutch were of the same "Low Dutch" stock, which was also that of the
Anglo-Saxons.[751] Thus there was seen the phenomenon of a vigorous
maritime and commercial development among the continental branches of
the race; while the English, having lost its early seafaring habits on
its new settlement, lagged far behind in both developments. Kinship, of
course, counted for nothing towards goodwill between the nations when it
could not keep peace within or between the towns; and in the fifteenth
century the Dutch cities are found at war with the Hansa, as they had
been in the thirteenth with England, and were to be again. But the
spirit of strife did its worst work at home. On the one hand, a physical
schism had been set up in Friesland in the thirteenth century by the
immense disaster of the inundation which enlarged the Zuyder Zee.[752]
Of that tremendous catastrophe there are singularly few historic traces;
but it had the effect of making two small countries where there had been
one large one, what was left of West Friesland being absorbed in the
specific province of Holland, while East Friesland, across the Zuyder
Zee, remained a separate confederation of maritime districts.[753] To
the south-west, again, the great Flemish cities were incurably jealous
of each other's prosperity, as well as inwardly distracted by their
class disputes; and within the cities of Holland, in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, while intelligible lines of cleavage between trades
or classes are hard to find, the factions of Hoek and Kabbeljauw, the
"Hooks" and the "Codfish," appear to have carried on a chronic strife,
as irrational as any to be noted in the cities of Italy. Thus in the
north as in the south, among Teutons as among "Latins" and among ancient
Greeks, the primary instincts of separation checked democratic growth
and coalition; though after the period of local feudal sovereignties the
powerful monarchic and feudal forces in the Netherlands withheld the
cities from internecine wars.
The most sympathetic historians are forced from the first to note
the stress of mutual jealousy among the cities and districts of the
Netherlands. "The engrained habit of municipal isolation," says
one, "was the cause why the general liberties of the Netherlands
were imperilled, why the larger part of the country was ultimately
ruined, and why the war of independence was conducted with so much
risk and difficulty, even in the face of the most serious perils"
(Thorold Rogers, _Holland_, p. 26. Cp. pp. 35, 43; Motley, pp. 29,
30, 43; Grattan, pp. 39, 50, 51). Van Kampen avows (_Geschichte der
Niederlande_, i, 131) that throughout the Middle Ages Friesland was
unprogressive owing to constant feuds. Even as late as 1670 Leyden
refused to let the Harle Maer be drained, because it would
advantage other cities; and Amsterdam in turn opposed the reopening
of the old Rhine channel because it would make Leyden maritime
(Temple, _Observations_, i, 130, ch. iii).
As regards the early factions of the "Hooks" and the "Codfish" in
the Dutch towns, the historic obscurity is so great that historians
are found ascribing the names in contrary ways. Grattan (p. 49)
represents the Hooks as the town party, and the Codfish as the
party of the nobles; Motley (p. 21) reverses the explanation,
noting, however, that there was no consistent cleavage of class or
of principle (cp. M'Cullagh, pp. 99, 100). This account is
supported by Van Kampen, i, 170, 171. The fullest survey of the
Hook and Cod feud is given by Wenzelburger, _Geschichte der
Niederlande_, i, 210-42. As to feuds of other parties in some of
the cities see Van Kampen, i, 172. They included, for example, a
class feud between the rich _Vetkooper_ (fat-dealers) and the poor
_Schieringer_ (eel-fishers). See Davies, i, 180.
Thus dissident, and with feudal wars breaking out in every generation,
the cities and provinces could win concessions from their feudal chiefs
when the latter were in straits, as in the famous case of the "Great
Privilege" extorted from the Duchess Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold
of Burgundy, after her father's overthrow by the Swiss; again in the
case of her husband Maximilian after her death; and previously in the
reaffirmation of the ill-observed Laws of Cortenberg, secured from the
Duke of Brabant by the Louvainers in 1372; but they could never deliver
themselves from the feudal superstition, never evolve the republican
ideal. When the rich citizens exploited the poor, it was the local
sovereign's cue, as of old, to win the populace; whereupon the
patricians leant to the over-lord, were he even the King of France; or
it might be that the local lord himself sought the intervention of his
suzerain, who again was at times the first to meddle, and against whom,
as against rival potentates, the cities would at times fight desperately
for their recognised head, when he was not overtaxing or thwarting them,
or endangering their commerce.[754] It was a medley of clashing
interests, always in unstable equilibrium. And so when sovereign powers
on a great scale, as the Dukes of Burgundy, followed by the Archduke
Maximilian, and later by the Emperor Charles, came into the inheritance
of feudal prestige, the Dutch and Flemish cities became by degrees
nearly as subordinate as those of France and Germany, losing one by one
their municipal privileges.[755] The monarchic superstition overbore the
passions of independence and primary interest; and a strong feudal ruler
could count on a more general and durable loyalty than was ever given to
any citizen-statesman. James van Arteveldt, who guided Ghent in the
fourteenth century, and whose policy was one of alliance with the
English king against the French, the feudal over-lord, was "the greatest
personality Flanders ever produced."[756] But though Arteveldt's policy
was maintained even by his murderers, murdered he was by his
fellow-citizens, as the great De Witt was to be murdered in Holland
three hundred years later. The monarchised Netherlanders were
republicans only in the last resort, as against insupportable tyranny.
Philip of Burgundy, who heavily oppressed them, they called "The Good."
At the end of the fifteenth century Maximilian was able, even before he
became Emperor, not only to crush the "bread-and-cheese" rebellion of
the exasperated peasantry in Friesland and Guelderland,[757] but to put
down all the oligarchs who had rebelled against him, and finally to
behead them by the dozen,[758] leaving the land to his son as a
virtually subject State.
In the sixteenth century, under Charles V, the men of Ghent, grown once
again a great commercial community,[759] exhibited again the fatal
instability of the undeveloped democracy of all ages. Called upon to pay
their third of a huge subsidy of 1,200,000 _caroli_ voted by the Flemish
States to the Emperor, they rang their bell of revolt and defied him,
offering their allegiance to the King of France. That monarch, by way of
a bargain, promptly betrayed the intrigue to his "brother," who
thereupon marched in force through France to the rebel city, now
paralysed by terror; and without meeting a shadow of resistance,
penalised it to the uttermost, beheading a score of leading citizens,
banishing many more, annulling its remaining municipal rights, and
exacting an increased tribute.[760] It needed an extremity of grievance
to drive such communities to an enduring rebellion. When Charles V
abdicated at Brussels in favour of his son Philip in 1555, he had
already caused to be put to death Netherlanders to the number at least
of thousands for religious heresy;[761] and still the provinces were
absolutely submissive, and the people capable of weeping collectively
out of sympathy with the despot's infirmities.[762] He, on his part,
born and educated among them, and knowing them well, was wont to say of
them that there was not a nation under the sun which more detested the
_name_ of slavery, or that bore the reality more patiently when managed
with discretion.[763] He spoke whereof he knew.
Sec. 2. _The Revolt against Spain_
That the people who endured so much at the hands of a despot should have
revolted unsubduably against his son is to be explained in terms of
certain circumstances little stressed in popular historiography. In the
narratives of the rhetorical historians, no real explanation arises. The
revolt figures as a stand for personal and religious freedom. But when
Charles abdicated, after slaying his thousands, the Reformation had been
in full tide for over thirty years; Calvin had built up Protestant
Geneva to the point of burning Servetus; England had been for twenty
years depapalised; France, with many scholars and nobles converted to
Calvinism, was on the verge of a civil war of Huguenots and Catholics;
the Netherlands themselves had been drenched in the blood of heretics;
and still no leading man had thought of repudiating either Spain or
Rome. Yet within thirteen years they were in full revolt, led by William
of Orange, now turned Protestant. Seeing that mere popular Protestantism
had spread far and gone fast, religious opinion was clearly not the
determining force.
In reality, the _conditio sine qua non_ was the psychological reversal
effected by Philip when he elected to rule as a Spaniard, where his
father had in effect ruled as a Fleming. Charles had always figured as a
native of the Netherlands, at home among his people, friendly to their
great men, ready to employ them in his affairs, even to the extent of
partly ruling Spain through them. After his punishment of Ghent they
were his boon subjects; and in his youth it was the Spaniards who were
jealous of the Flemish and Dutch. This state of things had begun under
his Flemish-German father, Philip I, who became King of Spain by
marriage, and under whom the Netherland nobles showed in Spain a
rapacity that infuriated the Spaniards against them. It was a question
simply of racial predominance; and had the dynasty chosen to fix its
capital in the north rather than in the south, it would have been the
lot of the Netherlanders to exploit Spain--a task for which they were
perfectly ready.
The gross rapacity of the Flemings in Spain under Philip I is
admitted by Motley (_Rise_, as cited, pp. 31, 75); but on the same
score feeling was passionately strong in Spain in the earlier years
of the reign of Charles. Cp. Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. i (Works,
ed. 1821, iv, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 77 78); and van
Kampen, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i, 277, 278. It took more
than ten years to bring Charles in good relations with the
Spaniards. See Mr. E. Armstrong's _Introduction_ to Major Martin
Hume's _Spain_, 1898, pp. 31-37, 57, 76. Even in his latter years
they are found protesting against his customary absence from Spain,
and his perpetual wars. Robertson, bk. vi, p. 494. Cp. bk. xii,
vol. v, p. 417, as to the disregard shown him after his abdication.
While it lasted, the Flemish exploitation of Spain was as shameless
as the Spanish exploitation of Italy. The Italian Peter Martyr
Angleria, residing at the court of Spain, reckoned that in ten
months the Flemings there remitted home over a million ducats
(Robertson, bk. i, p. 53). A lad, nephew of Charles's Flemish
minister Chievres, was appointed to the archbishopric of Toledo, in
defiance of general indignation. The result was a clerico-popular
insurrection. Everything goes to show that but for the Emperor's
prudence his Flemings would have ruined him in Spain, by getting
him to tyrannise for their gain, as Philip II later did for the
Church's sake in the Netherlands.
It is not unwarrantable to say that had not Charles had the sagacity to
adapt himself to the Spanish situation, learning to speak the language
and even to tolerate the pride of the nobles[764] to a degree to which
he never yielded before the claims of the burghers of the Netherlands,
and had he not in the end identified himself chiefly with his Spanish
interests, the history of Spain and the Netherlands might have been
entirely reversed. Had he, that is, kept his seat of rule in the
Netherlands, drawing thither the unearned revenues of the Americas, and
still contrived to keep Spain subject to his rule, the latter country
would have been thrown back on her great natural resources, her
industry, and her commerce, which, as it was, developed markedly during
his reign,[765] despite the heavy burdens of his wars. And in that case
Spain might conceivably have become the Protestant and rebellious
territory, and the Netherlands on the contrary have remained Catholic
and grown commercially decrepit, having in reality the weaker potential
economic basis.
The theorem that the two races were vitally opposed in "religious
sentiment," and that "it was as certain that the Netherlanders
would be fierce reformers as that the Spaniards would be
uncompromising persecutors" (Motley, p. 31), is part of the common
pre-scientific conception of national development, and proceeds
upon flat disregard of the historical evidence. It is well
established that there was as much heresy of the more rational
Protestant and Unitarian sort in Spain, to begin with, as in
Holland. Under Ferdinand and Isabella the Inquisition seems to
have struck mainly at Judaic and Moorish monotheistic heresy, which
was not uncommon among the upper classes, while the lower were for
the most part orthodox (Armstrong, _Introd._ to Major Hume's
_Spain_, pp. 14, 18). Thus there is good ground for the surmise
that Ferdinand's object was primarily the confiscation of the
wealth of Jews and other rich heretics. (See U.R. Burke, _History
of Spain_, 1895, ii, 101; Hume's ed. 1900, ii, 74.) In Aragon,
Valencia, and Catalonia there was general resistance to the
Inquisition; in Cordova there was a riot against it; in Saragossa
the Inquisitor was murdered before the altar (Armstrong, p. 18;
Llorente, _Hist. crit. de l'Inquisition d'Espagne_, ed. 1818, i,
185-213; M'Crie, _Reformation in Spain_, ed. 1856, pp. 52-53. Cp.
U.R. Burke, as cited, ii, 97, 98, 101, 103, 111; Hume's ed. ii, 66,
70-71, 74-77, 82; as to the general and prolonged resistance of the
people). During that reign Torquemada is credited with burning ten
thousand persons in eighteen years (Prescott, _History of Ferdinand
and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 178, citing Llorente. But see p.
746, _note_, as to possible exaggeration. Cp. Burke, ii, 113;
Hume's ed. ii, 84). In the early Lutheran period the spread of
scholarly Protestantism in Spain was extremely rapid (La
Rigaudiere, _Histoire des persecutions religieuses en Espagne_,
1860, p. 245 sq.), and in the early years of Philip II it needed
furious persecution to crush it, thousands leaving the kingdom
(Prescott, _Philip II_, bk. ii, ch. iii; M'Crie, _Reformation in
Spain_, ch. viii; De Castro, _History of the Spanish Protestants_,
Eng. tr. 1851, _passim_). At the outset, 800 persons were arrested
in Seville alone in one day; and the Venetian ambassador in 1562
testifies to the large number of Huguenots in Spain (Ranke, _Hist.
of the Popes_, bk. v, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. p. 136).
Had Philip II had Flemish sympathies and chosen to make Brussels
his capital, the stress of the Inquisition could have fallen on the
Netherlands as successfully as it actually did on Spain. His
father's reign had proved as much. According to Motley, not only
multitudes of Anabaptists but "thousands and tens of thousands of
virtuous and well-disposed men and women" had then been "butchered
in cold blood" (_Rise_, p. 43), without any sign of rebellion on
the part of the provinces, whose leading men remained Catholic. In
1600 most of the inhabitants of Groningen were Catholics (Davies,
ii, 347). A Protestant historian (Grattan, p. 93) admits that the
Protestants "never, and least of all in these days, formed the
mass." Another has admitted, as regards those of Germany, that
"nothing had contributed more to the undisturbed progress of their
opinions than the interregnum after Maximilian's death, the long
absence of Charles, and the slackness of the reins of government
which these occasioned" (Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. v, ed. cited
of _Works_, vol. iv, p. 387). "It was only tanners, dyers, and
apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the
Netherlands" (Motley, p. 124). The same conditions would have had
similar results in Spain, where many Catholics thought Philip much
too religious for his age and station (Motley, p. 76).
It seems necessary to insist on the elementary fact that it was
Netherlanders who put Protestants to death in the Netherlands; and
that it was Spaniards who were burnt in Spain. In the Middle Ages
"nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless than in
the Netherlands" (Motley, p. 36; cp. p. 132). Grenvelle, most
zealous of heresy-hunters, was a Burgundian; Viglius, an even
bitterer persecutor, was a Frisian. The statement of Prescott
(_Philip II_, Kirk's ed. 1894, p. 149) that the Netherlanders
"claimed freedom of thought as their birthright" is a gratuitous
absurdity. As regards, further, the old hallucination of "race
types," it has to be noted that Charles, a devout Catholic and
persecutor, was emphatically _Teutonic_, according to the
established canons. His stock was Burgundo-Austrian on the father's
side; his Spanish mother was of Teutonic descent; he had the fair
hair, blue eyes, and hanging jaw and lip of the Teutonic Hapsburgs
(see Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, cap. 341), and so had his
descendants after him. On the other hand, William the Silent was
markedly "Spanish" in his physiognomy (Motley, p. 56), and his
reticence would in all ages pass for a Spanish rather than a
"Teutonic" characteristic. Motley is reduced to such shifts of
rhetoric concerning Philip II as the proposition (p. 75) that "the
Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have
evaporated." But his descendant, Philip IV, as seen in the great
portraits of Velasquez, is, like him, a "typical" Teuton; and the
stock preserved the Teutonic physiological tendency to gluttony, a
most "un-Spanish" characteristic.
It is true that, as Buckle argues, the many earthquakes in Spain
tended to promote superstitious fear; but then on his principles
the Dutch seafaring habits, and the constant risks and frequent
disasters of inundation, had the same primary tendency. For the
rest, the one serious oversight in Buckle's theory of Spanish
civilisation is his assumption (cp. 3-vol. ed. ii, 455-61; 1-vol.
ed. p. 550) that Spanish "loyalty" was abnormal and continuous from
the period of the first struggles with the Moors. As to this see
the present writer's notes in the 1-vol. ed. of Buckle, as cited.
Even Ferdinand, as an Aragonese, was disrespectfully treated by the
Castilians (cp. Armstrong as cited, pp. 5, 31, etc.; De Castro,
_History of Religious Intolerance in Spain_, Eng. tr. 1853, pp. 40,
41); and Philip I and Charles V set up a new resistance. An alien
dynasty could set up disaffection in Spain as elsewhere.
It should be noted, finally, that the stiff ceremonialism which is
held to be the special characteristic of Spanish royalty was a
Burgundo-Teutonic innovation, dating from Philip I, and that even
in the early days of Philip the Cortes petitioned "that the
household of the Prince Don Carlos should be arranged on the old
Spanish lines, and not in the pompous new-fangled way of the House
of Burgundy" (Major Hume's _Spain_, p. 127). Prescott (_Philip II_,
ed. cited, pp. 655, 659) makes the petition refer to the king's own
household, and shows it to have condemned the king's excessive
expenditure in very strong terms, saying the expense of his
household was "as great as would be required for the conquest of a
kingdom." At the same time the Cortes petitioned against
bull-fights, which appear to have originated with the Moors, were
strongly opposed by Isabella the Catholic, and were much encouraged
by the Teutonic Charles V (U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, 1895,
ii, 2-4; Hume's ed. i, 328 _sq._). In fine, the conventional Spain
is a manufactured system, developed under a Teutonic dynasty. "To a
German race of sovereigns Spain finally owed the subversion of her
national system and ancient freedom" (Stubbs, _Const. Hist._ 4th
ed. i, 5).
No doubt the Dutch disaffection to Philip, which began to reveal itself
immediately after his accession, may be conceived as having economic
grounds. Indeed, his creation of fresh bishoprics, and his manipulation
of the abbey revenues, created instant and general resentment among
churchmen and nobles,[766] as compared with his mere continuation of
religious persecution; and despite his pledges to the contrary, certain
posts in the Low Countries were conferred on Spaniards.[767] But had he
shown his father's adaptability, all this could have been adjusted. Had
he either lived at Brussels or made the Flemings feel that he held them
an integral part of his empire, he would have had the zealous support of
the upper classes in suppressing the popular heresy, which repelled
them. Heresy in the Netherlands, indeed, seems thus far to have been on
the whole rather licentious and anarchic than austere or "spiritual."
The pre-Protestant movements of the Beguines, Beghards, and Lollards,
beginning well, had turned out worse than the orders of friars in the
south; and the decorous "Brethren of the Common Lot" were in the main
"good churchmen," only a minority accepting Protestantism.[768] In face
of the established formulas concerning the innate spirituality of the
Teuton, and of the play of his "conscience" in his course at the
Reformation, there stand the historic facts that in the Teutonic world
alone was the Reformation accompanied by widespread antinomianism,
debauchery, and destructive violence. In France, Spain, and Italy there
were no such movements as the Anabaptist, which so far as it could go
was almost a dissolution of sane society.[769] From Holland that
movement drew much of its strength and leadership, even as, in a
previous age, the antinomian movement of Tanquelin had there had its
main success.[770] Such was the standing of Dutch Protestantism in 1555;
and no edict against heresy could be more searching and merciless than
that drawn up by Charles in 1550[771] without losing any upper-class
loyalty. Philip did but strive to carry it out.[772]
Had Philip, further, maintained a prospect of chronic war for the
nobility of the Netherlands, the accruing chances of wealth[773] would
in all likelihood have sufficed to keep them loyal. In the early wars of
his reign with France immense gains had been made by them in the way of
ransoms and booty. When these ceased, luxury continuing, embarrassment
became general.[774] But when Philip's energies were seen to be mainly
bent on killing out heresy, the discontented nobles began to lean to the
side of the persecuted commonalty. At the first formation of the
Confederacy of the "Beggars" in 1566, almost the only zealous Protestant
among the leaders was William's impetuous brother Louis of Nassau, a
Calvinist by training, who had for comrade the bibulous Brederode. The
name of "Gueux," given to the malcontents in contempt by the councillor
Berlaimont, had direct application to the known poverty or embarrassment
of the great majority.[775] There was thus undisguisedly at work in the
Netherlands the great economic force which had brought about "the
Reformation" in all the Teutonic countries; and the needy nobles
insensibly grew Protestant as it became more and more clear that only
the lands of the Church could restore their fortunes.[776] This holds
despite the fact that the more intelligent Protestantism which latterly
spread among the people was the comparatively democratic form set up by
Calvin, which reached the Low Countries through France, finding the
readier reception among the serious because of the prestige accruing to
its austerity as against the moral disrepute which now covered the
German forms.
[As to the proportional success of Lutheranism and Calvinism, see
Motley, pp. 132, 133; and Grattan, pp. 110, 111. (On p. 110 of Grattan
there is a transposition of "second" and "third" groups, which the
context corrects.) Motley, an inveterate Celtophobe, is at pains to make
out that the Walloons rebelled first and were first reconciled to Rome,
"exactly like their Celtic ancestors, fifteen centuries earlier." He
omits to comment on the fact that it was only the French form of
Protestantism, that of Calvin, that became viable in the Netherlands at
all, or on the fact that indecent Anabaptism flourished mainly in
Friesland; though he admits that the Lutheran movement left all
religious rights in the hands of the princes, the people having to
follow the creed of their rulers. The "racial" explanation is mere
obscurantism, here as always. The Walloons of South Flanders were first
affected simply because they were first in touch with Huguenotism. That
they were never converted in large numbers to Protestantism is later
admitted by Motley himself (p. 797), who thereupon speaks of the
"intense attachment to the Roman ceremonial which distinguished the
Walloon population." Thus his earlier statement that they had rebelled
against "papal Rome" is admittedly false. They had rebelled simply
against the Spanish tyranny. Yet the false statement is left
standing--one more illustration of the havoc that may be worked in a
historian's intelligence by a prejudice. (For other instances see, in
the author's volume _The Saxon and the Celt_, the chapters dealing with
Mommsen and Burton.)
It was the Teutonic-speaking city populations of North Flanders and
Brabant who became Protestants in mass after the troubles had begun
(Motley, p. 798). When the Walloon provinces withdrew from the
combination against Spain, the cities of Ghent, Antwerp, Bruges, and
Ypres joined the Dutch Union of Utrecht. They were one and all reduced
by the skill and power of Alexander of Parma, who thereupon abolished
the freedom of Protestant worship. The Protestants fled in thousands to
England and the Dutch provinces, the remaining population, albeit mostly
Teutonic, becoming Catholic. At this moment one-and-a-half of the
four-and-a-half millions of Dutch are Catholics; while in Belgium, where
there are hardly any Protestants, the Flemish-speaking and
French-speaking populations are nearly equal in numbers.
Van Kampen, who anticipated Motley in disparaging the Walloons as being
Frenchly fickle (_Geschichte_, i, 366), proceeds to contend that even
the Flemings are more excitable than the Dutch and other Teutons; but he
notes later that as the Dutch poet Cats was much read and imitated in
Belgium, he was thus proved to have expressed the spirit of the whole
Netherlands (ii, 109). Once more, then, the racial theory collapses.]
Thus the systematic savagery of the Inquisition under Philip, for which
the people at first blamed not at all the king but his Flemish minister,
Cardinal Granvelle, served rather to make a basis and pretext for
organised revolt than directly to kindle it. In so far as the people
spontaneously resorted to violence, in the image-breaking riots, they
compromised and imperilled the nationalist movement in the act of
precipitating it. The king's personal equation, finally, served to make
an enemy of the masterly William of Orange, who, financially embarrassed
like the lesser nobility,[777] could have been retained as an
administrator by a wise monarch. A matter so overlaid with historical
declamation is hard to set in a clear light; but it may serve to say of
William that he was made a "patriot," as was Robert the Bruce, by stress
of circumstances;[778] and that in the one case as in the other it was
exceptional character and capacity that made patriotism a success;[779]
William in particular having to maintain himself against continual
domestic enmity, patrician as well as popular. Nothing short of the
ferocity and rapacity of the Spanish attack, indeed, could have long
united the Netherlands. The first confederacy dissolved at the approach
of Alva, who, strong in soldiership but incapable of a statesmanlike
settlement, drove the Dutch provinces to extremities by his cruelty,
caused a hundred thousand artisans and traders to fly with their
industry and capital, exasperated even the Catholic ministers in
Flanders by his proposed taxes, and finally by imposing them enraged
into fresh revolt the people he had crushed and terrorised, till they
were eager to offer the sovereignty to the queen of England. When
Requesens came with pacificatory intentions, it was too late; and the
Pacification of Ghent (1576) was but a breathing-space between grapples.
What finally determined the separation and independence of the Dutch
Provinces was their maritime strength. Antwerp, trading largely on
foreign bottoms, represented wealth without the then indispensable
weapons. Dutch success begins significantly with the taking of Brill
(1572) by the gang of William van der Marck, mostly pirates and
ruffians, whose methods William of Orange could not endure.[780] But
they had shown the military basis for the maritime States. It was the
Dutch fleet that prevented Parma's from joining "the" Armada under
Medina-Sidonia,[781] thereby perhaps saving England. Such military
genius and energy as Parma's might have made things go hard with the
Dutch States had he lived, or had he not been called off against his
judgment to fight in France; but his death well balanced the
assassination of William of Orange, who had thus far been the great
sustainer and welder of the movement of independence. Plotted against
and vilified by the demagogues of Ghent, betrayed by worthless fellow
nobles, Teutonic and French alike; chronically insulted in his own
person and humiliated in that of his brother John, whom the States
treated with unexampled meanness; stupidly resisted in his own
leadership by the same States, whose egoism left Maestricht to its fate
when he bade them help, and who cast on him the blame when it fell;
thwarted and crippled by the fanaticism and intolerant violence of the
Protestant mobs of the towns; bereaved again and again in the
vicissitude of the struggle, William turned to irrelevance all
imputations of self-seeking; and in his unfailing sagacity and fortitude
he finally matches any aristocrat statesman in history. Doubtless he
would have served Philip well had Philip chosen him and trusted him. But
as it lay in one thoroughly able man, well placed for prestige in a
crisis, to knit and establish a new nation, so it lay in one fanatical
dullard[782] to wreck half of his own empire, with the greatest captains
of his age serving him; and to bring his fabled treasury to ruin while
his despised rebels grew rich.
As to the vice of the Dutch constitution, the principle of the
supremacy of "State rights," see M'Cullagh, p. 215; Motley, _Rise_,
pp. 794, 795 (Pt. vi, ch. ii, _end_), and _United Netherlands_, ed.
1867, iv, 564. Wicquefort (_L'histoire des Provinces-Unies_, La
Haye, 1719, pp. 5, 16), following Grotius, laid stress long ago on
the fact that the Estates of each province recognised no superior,
not even the entire body of the Republic. It was only the measure
of central government set up in the Burgundo-Austrian and Spanish
periods that made the Seven Provinces capable of enough united
action to repel Spanish rule during a chronic struggle of eighty
years. Cp. Van Kampen (i, 304), who points out (p. 306) that the
word "State" first appears in Holland in the fifteenth century. It
arose in Flanders in the thirteenth, and in Brabant in the
fourteenth. Only in 1581, after some years of war, did the United
Provinces set up a General Executive Council. In the same year the
Prince of Orange was chosen sovereign (Motley, pp. 838, 841).
Sec. 3. _The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce_
The conquest of Flanders by Alexander of Parma, reducing its plains to
wolf-haunted wildernesses, and driving the great mass of the remaining
artisans from its ruined towns,[783] helped to consummate the prosperity
of the United Provinces, who took over the industry of Ghent with the
commerce of Antwerp.[784] Getting the start of all northern Europe in
trade, they had become at the date of their assured independence the
chief trading State in the world. Whatever commercial common sense the
world had yet acquired was there in force. And inasmuch as the wealth
and strength of these almost landless States, with their mostly poor
soil and unavoidably heavy imposts, depended so visibly on quantity of
trade turnover, they not only continued to offer a special welcome to
all immigrants, but gradually learned to forego the congenial Protestant
strife of sects. It was indeed a reluctantly-learned lesson. Even as
local patriotisms constantly tended to hamper unity during the very
period of struggle, so the primary spirit of self-assertion set the
ruling Calvinistic party upon persecuting not only Catholics and
Lutherans, but the new heresy of Arminianism:[785] so little does
"patriotic" warfare make for fraternity in peace. The judicial murder of
the statesman John van Olden Barneveldt (1619) at the hands of Maurice
of Orange, whom he had guarded in childhood and trained to
statesmanship, was accomplished as a sequel to the formal proscription
of the Arminian heresy in the Synod of Dort; and Barneveldt was formally
condemned for "troubling God's Church" as well as on the charge of
treason.[786] On the same pretexts Grotius was thrown into prison; and
the freedom of the press was suspended.[787] It was doubtless the shame
of the memory of the execution of Barneveldt (the true founder of the
Republic as such),[788] on an absolutely false charge of treason, and
the observation of how, as elsewhere, persecution drove away population,
that mainly wrought for the erection of tolerance (at least as between
Protestant sects) into a State principle.
The best side of the Dutch polity was its finance, which was a lesson to
all Europe. Already in the early stages of the struggle with Spain, the
States were able on credit to make war, in virtue of their character for
commercial honour. Where the king of Spain, with all his revenues
mortgaged past hope,[789] got from the Pope an absolution from the
payment of interest on the sums borrowed from Spanish and Genoese
merchants, and so ruined his credit,[790] the Dutch issued tin money and
paper money, and found it readily pass current with friends and
foes.[791]
Of all the Protestant countries, excepting Switzerland, the Dutch States
alone disposed of their confiscated church lands in the public
interest.[792] There was indeed comparatively little to sell,[793] and
the money was sorely needed to carry on the war; but the transaction
seems to have been carried through without any corruption. It was the
suggestion of what might be accomplished in statecraft by the new
_expertise_ of trade, forced into the paths of public spirit and checked
by a stress of public opinion such as had never come into play in
Venice. Against such a power as Spain, energy ruled by unteachable
unintelligence, a world-empire financed by the expedients of provincial
feudalism, the Dutch needed only an enduring resentment to sustain them,
and this Philip amply elicited. Had he spent on light cruisers for the
destruction of Dutch commerce the treasure he wasted on the Armadas
against England and on his enormous operations by land, typified in the
monstrous siege of Antwerp, he might have struck swiftly and surely at
the very arteries of Dutch life; but in yielding to them the command of
their primary source and channel of wealth, the sea, he insured their
ultimate success. In the Franco-Spanish war of 1521-25 the French
cruisers nearly ruined the herring fishery of Holland and Zealand;[794]
and it was doubtless the memory of that plight that set the States on
maintaining predominant power at sea.[795]
Throughout the war, which from first to last spread over eighty years,
the Dutch commerce grew while that of Spain dwindled. Under Charles V,
Flanders and Brabant alone had paid nearly two-thirds of the whole
imperial taxation of the Netherlands;[796] but after a generation or
two the United Provinces must have been on an equality of financial
resources with those left under Spanish rule, even in a state of peace.
Yet in this posture of things there had grown up a burden which
represented, in the warring commercial State, the persistent principle
of class parasitism; for at the Peace of Muenster (1648) the funded
public debt of the province of Holland alone amounted to nearly
150,000,000 florins, bearing interest at five per cent.[797] Of this
annual charge, the bulk must have gone into the pockets of the wealthier
citizens, who had thus secured a mortgage on the entire industry of the
nation. All the while, Holland was nominally rich in "possessions"
beyond sea. When, in 1580, Philip annexed Portugal, with which the Dutch
had hitherto carried on a profitable trade for the eastern products
brought as tribute to Lisbon, they began to cast about for an Asiatic
trade of their own, first seeking vainly for a north-east passage. The
need was heightened when in 1586 Philip, who as a rule ignored the
presence of Dutch traders in his ports under friendly flags, arrested
all the Dutch shipping he could lay hands on;[798] and when in 1594 he
closed to them the port of Lisbon, he forced them to a course which his
successors bitterly rued. In 1595 they commenced trading by the Cape
passage to the Indies, and a fleet sent out by Spain to put down their
enterprise was as usual defeated.[799] Then arose a multitude of
companies for the East Indian trade, which in 1602 were formed by the
government into a great semi-official joint-stock concern, at once
commercial and military, reminiscent of the Hanseatic League. The result
was a long series of settlements and conquests. Amboyna and the Moluccas
were seized from the Portuguese, now subordinate to Spain; Java, where a
factory was founded in 1597, was in the next generation annexed; Henry
Hudson, an English pilot in the Dutch Company's service, discovered the
Hudson River and Bay in 1609, and founded New Amsterdam about 1624. In
1621 was formed the Dutch West India Company, which in fifteen years
fitted out 800 ships of trade and war, captured 545 from the Spanish and
Portuguese, with cargoes valued at 90,000,000 florins, and conquered the
greater part of what had been the Portuguese empire in Brazil.
No such commercial development had before been seen in Europe. About
1560, according to Guicciardini,[800] 500 ships had been known to come
and go in a day from Antwerp harbour in the island of Walcheren; but in
the spring of 1599, it is recorded, 640 ships engaged solely in the
Baltic trade discharged cargoes at Amsterdam;[801] and in 1610,
according to Delacourt, there sailed from the ports of Holland in three
days, on the eastward trade alone, 800 or 900 ships and 1,500 herring
boats.[802] At the date of the Peace of Muenster these figures were left
far behind, whence had arisen a reluctance to end the war, under which
commerce so notably flourished. Many Hollanders, further, had been
averse to peace in the belief that it would restore Antwerp and injure
their commerce, even as Prince Maurice of Orange, the republic's general
and stadthouder, had been averse to it as likely to lessen his power and
revenue.[803] But between 1648 and 1669 the trade increased by fifty per
cent.,[804] Holland taking most of the Spanish trade from the shipping
of England and the Hansa, and even carrying much of the trade between
Spain and her colonies. When the Dutch had thus a mercantile marine of
10,000 sail and 168,000 men, the English carried only 27,196 men; and
the Dutch shipping was probably greater than that of all the rest of
Europe together.[805]
This body of trade, as has been seen, was built up by a State which,
broadly speaking, had a surplus wealth-producing power in only one
direction, that of fishing; and even of its fishing, much was done on
the coasts of other nations. In that industry, about 1610, it employed
over 200,000 men; and the Greenland whale fishery, which was a monopoly
from 1614 to 1645, began to expand rapidly when set free,[806] till in
1670 it employed 120 ships.[807] For the rest, though the country
exported dairy produce, its total food product was not equal to its
consumption; and as it had no minerals and no vineyards, its surplus
wealth came from the four sources of fishing, freightage, extorted
colonial produce, and profits on the handling of goods bought and sold.
_Par excellence_, it was, in the phrase of Louis XIV, the nation of
shopkeepers, of middlemen; and its long supremacy in the business of
buying cheap and selling dear was due firstly to economy of means and
consumption, and secondarily to command of accumulated money capital at
low rates of interest. The sinking of interest was the first sign that
the limits to its commercial expansion were being reached; but it
belonged to the conditions that, with or without "empire," its advantage
must begin to fall away as soon as rival States were able to compete
with it in the economies of "production" in the sense of transport and
transfer.
In such economies the Dutch superiority grew out of the specially
practical basis of their marine--habitual fishing and the constant use
of canals. There is no better way than the former of building up
seamanship; and just as the Portuguese grew from hardy fishers to daring
navigators, so the Dutch grew from thrifty fishers and bargemen to
thrifty handlers of sea-freight, surpassing in economy the shippers of
England as they did in seamanship the marine of Spain. Broadly speaking,
the navies which owed most to royal fostering--as those of Spain,
France, and in part England--were the later to reach efficiency in the
degree of their artificiality; and the loss of one great Spanish navy
after another in storms must be held to imply a lack of due experience
on the part of their officers.
One of the worst military mistakes of Spain was the creation of
great galleons in preference to small cruisers. The sight of the
big ships terrorised the Dutch once, in 1606; but as all existing
seacraft had been built up in small vessels, there was no
sufficient science for the navigation of the great ones in stress
of weather, or even for the building of them on sound lines. The
English and Dutch, on the other hand, fought in vessels of the kind
they had always been wont to handle, increasing their size only by
slow degrees. In the reign of Henry VIII, again, nothing came of
the English expeditions of discovery fitted out by him (Schanz,
_Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 321), but private voyages were
successfully made by traders (_id._ pp. 321, 327).
In the seventeenth century, however, and until far on in the
eighteenth, all Dutch shipping was more economically managed than
the English. In all likelihood the Dutch traders knew and improved
upon the systematic control of ship-construction which the
Venetians and Genoese had first copied from the Byzantines, and in
turn developed. (Above, p. 197.) Raleigh was one of the first to
point out that the broad Dutch boats carried more cargo with fewer
hands than those of any other nation (_Observations touching
Trade_, in _Works_, ed. 1829, viii, 356). Later in the century
Petty noted that the Dutch practised freight-economies and
adaptations of every kind, having different sorts of vessels for
different kinds of traffic (_Essays in Political Arithmetic_
[1690], ed. 1699, pp. 179, 180, 182, 183). This again gave them the
primacy in shipbuilding for the whole of Europe (_Memoires de Jean
De Witt_, ptie. i, ch. vi), though they imported all the materials
for the purpose. When Colbert began navy-building, his first care
was to bring in Dutch shipwrights (Dussieux, _Etude biographique
sur Colbert_, 1886, p. 101). Compare, as to the quick sailing of
the Dutch, Motley, _United Netherlands_, ed. 1867, iv, 556. In the
next century the English marine had similar economic advantages
over the French, which was burdened by royal schemes for
multiplying seamen (see Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 37).
The frugality which pervaded the whole of Dutch life may, however,
have had one directly disastrous effect. Sir William Temple noted
that the common people were poorly fed (_Observations upon the
United Provinces_, ch. iv: Works, ed. 1814, i, 133, 147); and
though their fighting ships were manned by men of all nations, the
tendency was to feed them in the native fashion. Such a practice
would tell fatally in the sea-fights with the English. Cp.
Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 123.
In addition to this expertness in handling, the Dutch traders seem to
have bettered the lesson taught them by the practice of the Hansa, as to
the importance of keeping up a high character for probity. At a time
when British goods were open to more or less general suspicion as being
of short measure or bad quality,[808] the Dutch practice was to insure
by inspection the right quality and quantity of all packed goods,
especially the salted herrings, which were still the largest source of
Dutch income.[809] And that nothing might be left undone to secure the
concourse of commerce to their ports, they maintained under almost every
stress[810] of financial hardship the principle of minimum duties on
imports of every description. The one notable exception to this policy
of practically free trade--apart from the monopoly of the trade in the
Indies--was the quite supererogatory veto on the importation of fish
from other countries at a time when most of the fishing of Northern
Europe was in Dutch hands.[811] Where imports were desirable they were
encouraged. Thus it came about that landless Amsterdam was the chief
European storehouse for grain, and treeless Holland the greatest centre
of the timber trade. Before such a spectacle the average man held up his
hands and confessed the incomparable ingenuity of the Hollanders. But
others saw and stated the causation clearly enough. "Many writing on
this subject," remarks Sir William Petty, "do magnifie the Hollanders
as if they were more, and all other nations less, than men, as to the
matters of trade and policy; making them angels, and all others fools,
brutes, and sots, as to those particulars; whereas," he continues,
giving a sound lesson in social science to his generation, "I take the
foundation of their achievements to be originally in the situation of
the country, whereby they do things inimitable by others, and have
advantages whereof others are incapable."[812] And Sir Josiah Child, of
the same generation, declared similarly against transcendentalism in
such matters. "If any," he roundly declares, "shall tell me it is the
nature of those people to be thrifty, I answer, _all men by nature are
alike_; it is only laws, custom, and education that differ men; their
nature and disposition, and the disposition of all people in the world,
proceed from their laws."[813] For "laws" read "circumstances and
institutions," adding reservations as to climate and temperament and
variation of _individual_ capacity and bias, and the proposition is the
essence of all sociology. Economic lessons which Petty and Child could
not master have since been learned; but their higher wisdom has hardly
yet been assimilated.
The sufficient proof that Holland had no abnormal enlightenment even in
commerce was that, like her rivals, she continued to maintain the system
of monopoly companies. Her "empire" in the East, to which was falsely
ascribed so much of her wealth, in reality stood for very little sound
commerce. The East India Company being conducted on high monopoly lines,
the profits were made rather through the smallness than the greatness of
the trade done. Thus, while the Company paid enormous dividends,[814]
the imports of spice were kept at a minimum, in order to maintain the
price, large quantities being actually destroyed for the purpose. For a
time they contrived to raise pepper to double the old Portuguese
price.[815] Such methods brought it about that when the republic had in
all 10,000 sail, the East India trade employed only ten or twelve
ships.[816] All the while the small class of capitalists who owned the
shares were able to satisfy the people that the merely monetary and
factitious riches thus secured to the Company's shareholders was a form
of public wealth.[817]
It is a complete error to say, as did Professor Seeley (_Expansion
of England_, p. 112), that Holland "made her fortune in the world"
because the war with Spain "threw open to her attack the whole
boundless possessions of her antagonist in the New World, which
would have been closed to her in peace. By conquest she made for
herself an empire, and this empire made her rich." In the first
place it was not in the New World that she mainly sought her
empire, but in the East Indies, in the sphere of the Portuguese
conquests. Her hold of Brazil lasted only from 1621 to 1654, and
was not a great source of wealth, though she captured much Spanish
and Portuguese shipping. But even her eastern trade was, as we have
seen, small in quantity, and as a source of wealth was not to be
compared with the herring fishery. In 1601 John Keymor declared
that more wealth was produced by the northern fisheries "in one
year than the King of Spain hath in four years out of the Indies"
(_Observations made upon the Dutch Fishing about the Year
1601_--reprint in _Phoenix_, 1707, i, 225). The Dutch takings in
six months' fishing were then reckoned at 3,600,000 barrels, valued
at as many pounds sterling (_id._ p. 224); the fishing fleet
numbered 4,100 sail of all kinds, with over 3,000 tenders, out of a
roughly estimated total of 20,000; while the whole Indian fleet is
stated at only 40 or 50, employing 5,000 or 6,000 men (_id._ p.
223), as against a total of some 200,000 of Dutch seafaring
population. Howell, writing in 1622 (ed. Bennett, 1891, vol. i,
205), also puts the Amsterdam ships in the Indian trade at 40.
Professor Seeley's statement cannot have proceeded on any
comparison of the European Dutch trade with the revenue from the
conquered "empire." It stands for an endorsement of the vulgar
delusion that "possessions" are the great sources of a nation's
wealth, though Seeley elsewhere (p. 294) protests against the
"bombastic language of this school," and notes that "England is
not, directly at least, any the richer" for her connection with her
"dependencies."
Against the class-interest behind the East India Company the republican
party, as led and represented by De Witt, were strongly arrayed. They
could point to the expansion of the Greenland whaling trade that had
followed on the abolition of the original monopoly in that adventure--an
increase of from ten to fifteen times the old quantity of
product[818]--and the treatise expounding their policy strongly
condemned the remaining monopolies of all kinds. But there was no
sufficient body of enlightened public opinion to support the attack; and
the menaced interests spontaneously turned to the factor which could
best maintain them against such pressure--the military power of the
House of Orange. The capitalist monopolists and "imperialists" of the
republic were thus the means first of artificially limiting its economic
basis, and later of subverting its republican constitution--a disservice
which somewhat outweighs the credit earned by them, as by the merchant
oligarchies of Venice, for an admirable management of their army.[819]
Sec. 4. _Home and Foreign Policy_
The vital part played by William the Silent at the outset of the war of
independence gave his house a decisive predominance in the affairs of
the republic, grudging as had often been its support of him during life.
As always, the state of war favoured the rule of the imperator, once the
institution had been established. Fanatical clergy and populace alike
were always loud in support of the lineage of the Deliverer; and with
their help William's son Maurice was able to put to death Barneveldt.
Then and afterwards, accordingly, war was more or less the Orange
interest; and after the Peace of Muenster we find the republican party
sedulous at once to keep the peace and to limit the power of the
hereditary stadthouder. The latter, William II, aged twenty-four, having
on his side the great capitalists, tried force in a fashion which
promised desperate trouble,[820] but died at the crisis (1650), his only
child being born a week after his death.
It was substantially the pressure of the Orange interest, thus situated,
that led to the first naval war between Holland and England, both then
republics, and both Protestant. Orangeist mobs, zealous for Charles I,
as the father of the Princess of Orange, insulted the English republican
ambassadors who had come to negotiate on Cromwell's impossible scheme
for a union of the two republics; and the prompt result was the
Navigation Act, intended[821] to hurt Dutch commerce. It was really
powerless for that purpose; but the Dutch people in general believed
otherwise, and, being not only independent but bellicose, they were as
ready as Puritan England for a struggle at sea. While, however, they
held their ground in the main as fighters, they suffered heavily in
their trade. By 1653 they had lost over sixteen hundred ships through
English privateering; so that the two years of the English war had done
them more injury than the eighty years of the Spanish.[822] Accordingly,
though forced again to war by Charles II, the republican party put it as
a maxim of policy that Dutch prosperity depended on peace.[823] It is
nevertheless one of the tragedies of their history that John de Witt,
the great statesman who owed most heed to this maxim, was inveigled by
the English Government into an ill-judged alliance against France,[824]
and was then deserted by England, whereupon the republic was invaded by
France, and De Witt was murdered by his own people. Of all the nations
of Europe the Dutch were then the best educated; but no more than
ancient Athens had their republic contrived to educate its mob. The
result was a frightful moral catastrophe.
It is easy at this time of day to find fault with De Witt's policy of
two hundred years ago, but hard to reckon aright the practical
possibilities of his situation. Suffice it to say that the formation of
the Triple Alliance of Holland, England, and Sweden against Louis XIV
proved a ruinous mistake. France had supported the republic against
Spain; and Louis had stood by it when Charles II invited him to join in
dismembering it. Yet, after sending its fleet up the Medway and forcing
Charles to the humiliating Peace of Breda, and in the full knowledge
that he hated the republic which had harboured and criticised him, De
Witt was persuaded by Sir William Temple, the English ambassador, to
sign, albeit reluctantly,[825] a treaty of union (1668) which made
France a strenuous enemy, and from which Charles nevertheless instantly
drew back, making secretly a treacherous treaty with Louis, and leaving
Holland open to French invasion. It was the bane of the diplomacy of the
age to be perpetually planning alliances on all hands by way of
maintaining the "balance of power"; and De Witt, while justly suspicious
of England, could not be content to drop the system. His excuse was that
Louis was avowedly bent on the acquisition or control of the Spanish
Netherlands; and that after that there would be small security for the
republic. Yet he had better have remained the ally of France than leant
on the broken reeds of the friendship of Spain and the English king.
Charles needed only to appeal to the English East India Company, whose
monopoly was pitted against that of the Dutch Company, to secure a
parliamentary backing for a fresh war with Holland; and the sudden
invasion of the republic by France (1672) was the ruin of the De Witts.
It was an Orange mob that murdered them; and the young William of Orange
pensioned those who had formally accused them of treason.
The action of Charles in 1672 had been a masterpiece of baseness. After
secretly betraying his Dutch allies to Louis, he caused his own fleet,
before war had been declared, to attack a rich Dutch merchant fleet in
the Channel, with the worthy result of a capture of only two ships. His
declaration of war, when made, included such pretexts as that there is
"scarce a town in their territories that is not filled with abusive
pictures and false historical medals and pillars," which "alone were
cause sufficient for our displeasure, and the resentment of all our
subjects"; and he alleged breach of a non-existent article in the Treaty
of Breda.[826] It was in this disgraceful war that Shaftesbury gave out
as the true policy of England the maxim of Cato--_Delenda est
Carthago_--and the end of it was that in 1673, after a war without
triumphs, in which finally the English fleet under Rupert was defeated
by that of the Dutch while the French fleet stood idly by (1673), the
betrayed betrayer made peace with Holland once more (1674).
The hostility of France on the other hand practically ended Dutch
republicanism, though at the same time it brought about the wreck of the
"empire" of Louis XIV. Had he accepted the submission offered by De
Witt, he might have made a sure ally of Holland as against England. But
his policy of conquest, insolently formulated by his minister Louvois,
first put the Dutch Government in the hands of the Prince of Orange, and
then turned the English interest, despite the King, against France. It
may be taken as a law of European politics that any power which
arrogantly sets itself to overbear the others will itself, in the course
of one or two generations at furthest, be beaten to its knees. The end
of the insolent aggression of Louis came when, after William had become
King of England and set up a new tradition of Protestant union against
France, the military genius of Marlborough in the next reign reduced
France to extremities. Meanwhile Holland was past its period of
commercial climax, past the ideals of De Witt, past republicanism for
another era. Henceforth it was to be subservient to its stadthouder,
and to become ultimately a kingdom, on the failure of the republican
movement at the French Revolution.
Sec. 5. _The Decline of Commercial Supremacy_
It follows from what has been seen of the conditions of its success that
the Dutch trade could not continue to eclipse that of rival States with
greater natural sources of wealth when once those States had learned to
compete with Dutch methods. But it belonged to the culture-conditions
that the rival States should take long to learn the lesson, and that the
Dutch should be the first to adapt themselves to new circumstances. The
blunders of their enemies lengthened the Dutch lease. Louis XIV gave one
last vast demonstration of what Catholicism can avail to wreck States by
revoking the Edict of Nantes (1686), and so driving from France a
quarter of a million of industrious subjects, part of whom went to
England, many to Switzerland, but most to Holland, conveying their
capital and their handicrafts with them. The stroke hastened the
financial as well as the military exhaustion of France in the next
twenty-five years. England, on the other hand, maintained its trade
monopolies, which, with the system of imposts, drove over to the Dutch
and the French much trade that a better policy might have kept.[827] But
all the Dutch advantages were consummated in the command of money
capital at low rates of interest, and consequent capacity to trade for
small profits.
This accumulation of money capital was the correlative of the main
conditions of Dutch commerce. A community drawing its income--save for
the great resource of fishing--from its middleman-profits and
freightage, and from its manufacture of other nations' raw products in
competition with their own manufacture, must needs save credit capital
for its own commerce' sake. Thus, whereas the earlier Flemings were
luxurious in their expenditure,[828] the Dutch middle-class were the
most frugal in north-western Europe,[829] their one luxury being the
laudable one of picture-buying. But when, through mere increase of
population and consequently of trade, interest gradually fell[830] in
the rival communities, who in turn could practise fishing, who had
better harbours, who extended their marine commerce, began to
manufacture for themselves, and had natural resources for barter and
production that Holland wholly lacked, the Dutch trade slowly but surely
fell away. And as against the sustaining force of their frugality and
their systematic utilisation of their labour-power, the Dutch lay under
burdens which outweighed even those imposed on France and England by bad
government. Not only did the national debt force a multiplication of
imposts on every article of home consumption,[831] but the constant cost
of the maintenance of the sea-dykes was a grievous natural tax from
which there was no escape. Nor would the creditor class on any score
consent to forego their bond.
Thus it came about that after the Peace of Utrecht (1713), which left
Holland deeper in debt than ever, there was an admitted decline in the
national turnover from decade to decade. It is one of the fallacies of
the non-economic interpretation of history to speak of the United
Provinces as thenceforth showing a moral "languor";[832] the rational
explanation is that their total economic nutrition was curtailed by the
competing environment. Yet it must be admitted that the merchant class
themselves, when called on by the stadthouder William IV to compare
notes as to the decline, showed little recognition of the natural causes
beyond dwelling on the effect of heavy taxes, which had been insisted on
long before by the party of De Witt.[833] Dwelling as they do on the
value of the old maxims of toleration, which were now beside the case,
and failing to realise that the sheer produce of the other countries was
a decisive factor in competition, they seem to invite such a reaction in
economic theory as was set up by the French Physiocrats, who laid their
finger on this as the central fact in industrial life.
France, indeed, had learned other vital lessons after the great
defeat of Louis XIV. Nothing in the history of that age is more
remarkable than the fashion in which the immense blunder of the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was _pro tanto_ cured under the
Regency and under Louis XV by the infiltration of fresh population.
Dean Tucker noted, what the Dutch merchants apparently did not,
that "Flanders, all Germany on this side of the Rhine, Switzerland,
Savoy, and some parts of Italy, pour their supernumerary hands
every year into France" (_Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 27). At that
time (1750) there were said to be 10,000 Swiss and Germans in Lyons
alone, and the numbers of immigrants in all the commercial towns
were increasing (_id._ pp. 27, 28), the Government having become
"particularly gentle and indulgent to foreigners." At that period,
too, the French peasantry were prolific (_id._ p. 45).
Above all, the Dutch Provinces were bound to be outclassed in
manufactures by England when England began to manufacture by machinery
and by steam. Anciently well-forested,[834] they had long been nearly
bare of wood, so that their fuel had become, as it still is, scarce and
expensive.[835] They had done wonders with windmills; but when coal came
into play as driving power the coal-producing State was bound to
triumph. It must, however, be kept on record that when England's
commerce had thus begun to distance that of her old rival in virtue of
her mere economic basis, Englishmen were none the less ready to resort
to wanton aggression. Throughout the eighteenth century the ideal of
monopoly markets continued to rule in Europe; and that ideal it was that
inspired the struggles of France and England for the possession of India
and North America. In the course of those imperialist wars the
Government of the elder Pitt gave to privateers the right to confiscate,
as "contraband of war," nearly all manner of commerce between France and
other nations, and in particular that of Holland, Pitt's aim being to
force the Dutch into his alliance against France. The injury thus
wrought to their trade was enormous. "Perhaps at no time in history were
more outrageous injuries perpetrated on a neutral nation than those
which the Dutch suffered from the English during the time of the elder
Pitt's administration."[836] It was the method of imperialism; and the
usual sequel was at hand in the revolt of the American Colonies. In that
crisis also, because the Dutch Council of State, despite the wish of the
stadthouder, refused to take part against the Colonies, the English
Government as before gave letters of marque to privateers, and told the
plundered Dutch that if they increased their fleet to protect their own
commerce the action would be taken as hostile. "In 1779 the English
commander, Fielding, captured the Dutch mercantile fleet, with four
Dutch men-of-war; and in 1780 Yorke, the English Ambassador at The
Hague, demanded subsidies from the States, whom his Government had just
before plundered."[837]
Needless to say, Dutch wealth and power had greatly dwindled before this
insult was ventured on by the rival people. Holland's primary source of
wealth, the fisheries, had been in large part appropriated by other
nations, in particular by Britain, now her great competitor in that as
well as in other directions.[838] But all the while Holland's own
"empire" was a main factor in her weakening. Deaf to the doctrine of De
Witt, her rulers had continued to keep the East Indian trade on a
monopoly basis, ruling their spice islands as cruelly and as
blindly[839] as any rival could have done; and it was the false
economics and false finance bound up with their East India Company that
ruined the great Bank of Amsterdam, which at the French Revolution was
found to have gambled away all its funds in the affairs of the Company,
in breach of the oath of the magistrates, who were the sworn custodians
of the treasure. So situated, the Government could or would make no
effort in the old fashion against English tyranny. The State's economic
basis being in large part gone, and the capitalistic interest incapable
of unifying or inspiring the nation, Holland had, so to speak, to begin
life over again. But it would be a delusion to suppose that the
political decline meant misery; on the contrary, there was much less of
that in Holland than in triumphant England. There were still wealthy
citizens, as indeed always happens in times of decline of general
wealth. At that very period "the Dutch were the largest creditors of any
nation in Europe";[840] and Smith in 1776 testified that Holland was "in
proportion to the extent of the land and the number of its inhabitants
by far the richest country in Europe," adding that it "has accordingly
the greatest share of the carrying trade of Europe,"[841] and again that
its capitalists had much money in British stocks. But these were not as
broad foundations as the old; nor were they easily expansible, or even
maintainable. As soon, indeed, as the rise of other national debts
enabled them to invest abroad, they did so. Temple has recorded how,
when any part of the home debt was being paid off in his time, the
scripholders "received it with tears, not knowing how to dispose of it
to interest with such safety and ease." England soon began to relieve
them of such anxiety. But though Holland could thus gain from the
annual interest-tribute paid by borrowing States, as England does at
this moment, such income in a time of shrinking industry stands only for
the idle life of the endowed class, a factor neither industrially nor
intellectually wholesome. At the beginning of the seventeenth century
Keymor, an English observer who studied Dutch commercial life closely,
exclaimed: "And not a Beggar there; everyone getting his own Living is
admirable to behold."[842] This seems to have been an exaggeration,
since in 1619 we find Howell praising the "strictness of their laws
against mendicants, and their hospitals of all sorts for young and old,
both for the relief of the one and the employment of the other."[843]
Later there grew up, however carefully provided for,[844] a notably
large pauper population; and so late as 1842 Laing, who liked Holland,
wrote of it as "a country full of capitalists and paupers."[845] In the
main, modern Dutch life has of necessity had to find sounder bases; and
the chief feature in it during the past generation has been the new and
great industrial expansion.
Sec. 6. _The Culture Evolution_
From first to last the culture-history of Holland illustrates clearly
enough the importance of the freer political life to the life of the
mind. It is in the period of independence that Holland begins to play a
great part in European culture. Previously, the multitude of popular
"chambers of rhetoric,"[846] and so forth, yielded no fine fruits; but
in the stress of self-government the republic begins to produce
scholars, thinkers, and men of science, who affect those of surrounding
nations. Already in 1584, when nothing of the kind existed in France or
England, a Dutch literary academy published a Dutch grammar;[847] and
the republic was "the peculiarly learned State of Europe throughout the
seventeenth century,"[848] producing more of original classical research
and scholarly teaching in its small sphere than any other. Freedom and
endowment of university teaching brought in such Germans as Gronovius
and Graevius; and Leibnitz looked to little Holland as a model in many
things for backward Germany.[849] Printing became one of the industries
of the country; and the Elzevirs were long the great classic publishers
for Europe. Free universities and a free press, indeed, were the main
conditions of the Dutch classical renaissance.
The conditions of progress in _belles lettres_, on the other hand, being
less propitious, the development was inferior. All Europe could buy
Latin books printed in Holland; but few foreigners read Dutch, and the
finer native literature was sustained only by the necessarily small
class which had both leisure and culture. The very devotion to culture
which, as was claimed by Grotius, made the well-to-do Dutch in his youth
the greatest students of languages in Europe,[850] wrought rather for
the importation of foreign literature than the fostering or elevation of
the native. So that though the Catholic poetess Anna Bijns,[851] and
later the Catholic Spreghel, "the Dutch Ennius" (1549-1612), and Hooft,
"the Dutch Tacitus" (1581-1647), made worthy beginnings, there was no
great florescence. In the terms of the case, the two former represent
the general Catholic culture-influence; and Hooft, eminent alike as poet
and historian, owed his artistic stimulus to the three youthful years he
spent in Italy studying Italian literature.[852] Of the more celebrated
native poets, Cats is prosaic, though to this day highly popular,
suiting as he does the plane of taste developed under a strenuous
commercialism; and Vondel alone, by his influence on Milton, enters into
the blood of outside European literature.
Fanatical Calvinism,[853] again, was not primarily favourable to
philosophic thought; and it is to the influence of Descartes, who made
Holland his home for many years, that the possibility of the later great
performance of Spinoza is to be ascribed. But the impulse, once given,
and sustained by such an atmosphere as was set up by Bayle and other
French refugees, developed a new culture-force; and in the eighteenth
century the Dutch press was a disseminator of French and English
rationalism, as well as of the classic erudition which still flourished.
All along, though none of the supreme names in science is Dutch,
scientific culture was in general higher than elsewhere.[854] Such
influences made afresh for a revival of native literature, and
throughout the eighteenth century it is the foreign stimulus that is
seen at work. Thus Van Effen (1684-1725) read much English and wrote
much French, but was also the best Dutch writer of his time; the
brothers Van Haren (1710-79) were diplomatists, and friends of Voltaire;
and the two lady novelists, Wolff and Deken, produced their three
admired books (1782-92) under the influence of Richardson and Goethe.
But as against these debts to foreign example, the Dutch Republic in its
time of flower produced a great and markedly native body of art, which
to this day ranks in its kind with that of the great age in Italy. It
may have been the example set in the Spanish Netherlands by the Austrian
archdukes, after the severance, that gave the lead to the Dutch growth;
but there is no imitation and nothing nationally second-rate in their
total output. The Flemish Rubens (1577-1640) precedes by twenty-one
years his pupil Vandyck and the great Spaniard Velasquez, and by nearly
thirty years the Dutch Rembrandt; but no four contemporary masters were
ever more individual; and the Dutch group of Rembrandt, Hals, Van der
Helst, Gerard Dow, and the rest, will hold its own with the Flemish
swarm headed by Rubens and Vandyck. It is worth while in this connection
to note afresh how closely is art florescence bound up with economic
forces. Dutch and Flemish art, like Italian, is in the first place
substantially a product of economic demand, the commercial aristocracy
of the Netherlands commissioning and buying pictures as did the clerical
aristocracy of Italy. It has been denied that there is any economic
explanation for the eventual arrest of great art in the Netherlands; but
when we note the special conditions of the case the economic explanation
will be found decisive.
Great art, it is true, always tends to set up a convention, which is the
stoppage of greatness; but even great art can so arrest progress only
when the economic and social sphere is curtailed; and the Dutch economic
sphere, as we have seen, was practically non-expansive after the
disaster of 1672, which date also begins a new period of ruinous war for
Flanders. Rembrandt died in 1664. He and his contemporaries and their
pupils had produced a body of painting immense in quantity; and the
later and poorer generations, having such a body of classic work passed
on to them, naturally and necessarily rested on their treasure. The
population of the United Provinces, estimated to have reached a
million-and-a-half in the Middle Ages,[855] had risen in the great
period to three or three-and-a-half millions.[856] From this figure it
positively fell away in the eighteenth century.[857] Here then was a
shrinking population, loaded with old and new debt and overwhelmed with
taxes, consciously growing poorer, with no prospect of recovery, and
already stocked with a multitude of pictures[858] by great masters.
That it should go on commissioning new pictures with the old munificence
was impossible: it was more concerned to sell than to buy; and what
demand had elicited lack of demand arrested. There is no clearer
sociological case in history.
Sec. 7. _The Modern Situation_
After all that has come and gone, it is important to realise, in
correction of the megalomaniac view of things, that Holland is to-day
literally larger,[859] more populated,[860] and more productive than she
was in the "palmy days"; and that her colonial "empire," now
administered on just principles, includes a population of over
30,000,000. Over sixty years ago M'Culloch wrote that "though their
commerce be much decayed, the Dutch, even at this moment, are _the
richest and most comfortable people of Europe_."[861] The latter part of
the statement would not be very far out to-day, though popular comfort
perhaps does not now keep pace with population. Otherwise it no longer
holds. In the latter half of the nineteenth century there began a
vigorous revival of Dutch commerce and industry, Holland becoming once
more expansive. From 1872 to 1906 Dutch exports, measured by weight,
increased ninefold, imports sixfold, and transit trade over threefold;
and the expansion steadily continues; the value of the transit trade
rising from 9,392 million guilders in 1906 to 12,684 millions in 1910;
while imports increased by nearly 30 per cent and exports by 26 per
cent. Much of this expansion appears to be due to the advantages
accruing to Holland as a free-trade country alongside of protectionist
Germany, whose far greater natural resources redound largely to the gain
of the free-trading neighbour.
In detail, the commercial situation of to-day is curiously like the old
at many points. The debt is still relatively great--about L97,000,000
sterling;[862] and about a fourth of the whole expenditure is interest;
another fourth going for "defence." Always making the best of their
soil, alike with roots and cereals, the people go on increasing the area
under cultivation and the yield per hectare.[863] Still, as of old,
much food and raw material is imported to be exported again[864]--in
large part to Germany. Fishing now employs only 20,000 men with over
5,300[865] boats; the annual product is valued at under L1,000,000; and
of over 10,800 clearances of vessels from Dutch ports in 1910 only 4,533
were Dutch, representing a total mercantile navy of only 764.[866] But
of Dutch vessels engaged in the carrying trade between foreign ports
there were 4,383 in 1909,[867] with more than seven times the tonnage of
the home navy. Thus the nation still subsists largely by playing
middleman, partly by manufactures, partly by dairy and other produce,
little by fishing,[868] but still largely by freightage. Java does not
figure as a source of revenue for Holland, being administered in its own
interest,[869] with less taxation of the people than goes on in British
India.
Of the conditions which in Holland tell against increase of well-being,
the most notable is the large birth-rate resulting there as elsewhere
from the rapid modern expansion of industry. With a population less by
1,580,000 than that of Belgium, Holland has annually a larger surplus of
births over deaths. It may be interesting to compare Dutch statistics
with those of Portugal and Sweden, which have nearly the same
population, as regards birth-rate and emigration. Each of the three
States at 1895 had slightly over or under 5,000,000 inhabitants; and in
1909 slightly over or under 6,000,000. Their marriages and their
emigration were:--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Marriages. | Emigration.
----------------------------------------+----------------------------
|Portugal.| Holland.| Sweden.| Portugal.| Holland.|Sweden.
-----------+---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+-------
1895 | 33,018 | 35,598 | 28,728 | 44,746 | 1,314 |14,982
| | | | | |
1908, 1909,| | | | | |
or 1910 | 34,150 | 42,740 | 33,131 | 40,056 | 3,220 |23,529
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The emigration from Portugal in 1895 was abnormal; but in 1896 the
figures were 24,212, and in 1907 they reached 41,950. In Sweden in 1895
the excess of births over deaths was as high as 60,000. In Portugal it
was 47,997; a figure which in 1896 fell to 38,134; rising again to
64,312 in 1909. In Holland, the average excess in 1879-84 was 54,751; in
1897 it had risen to 77,586; in 1909 to 90,483. Under such circumstances
it needs the alleged doubling of Dutch commerce between 1872 and 1891,
and the subsequent continued expansion, to maintain well-being. As it
is, despite the tradition of good management of the poor, the number of
the needy annually relieved temporarily or continuously by the
charitable societies and communes[870] appears to be always over five
per cent. of the population--or about twice the average proportion of
paupers in the United Kingdom. The Dutch figures of course do not stand
for the same order of poverty; and there is certainly not in Holland a
proportional amount of the sordid misery that everywhere fringes the
wealth of England. But it is clear that Holland is becoming relatively
over-populated; and that the industrial conditions are not making
steadily for popular elevation, standing as they do for low wages and
grinding competition in many occupations.
Nor are these conditions favourable in Holland to general culture, as
apart from forms of specialism, any more than in England. Dutch experts
in recognised studies latterly hold their own with any--witness the
names of Kuenen, Tiele, van t'Hoff, de Goeje, de Vries, Dozy, Kern,
Lorentz, Waals--and the middle-class has probably a better average
culture than prevails in England or the United States; but the lapsed
Republic has yet to prove how much a small State may achieve in the
higher civilisation. Meantime, it is plainly not smallness but too rapid
increase in numbers that is the stumbling-block; and the possession of a
relatively great "empire" in Java does not avail, for Holland any more
than for England, to cure the social trouble at home.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 725: Motley, _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, 1-vol. ed. 1863, p.
18. For details of the different invasions see David, _Manuel de
l'histoire de Belgique_, 1847, pp. 37, 39, 41, 49. Cp. van Kampen,
_Geschichte der Niederlande_, Ger. ed. i, 82-89. Wenzelburger notes that
the "Norsemen" included not only Norwegians and Danes, but Saxons and
even Frisians (_Geschichte der Niederlande_, 1879, i, 61).]
[Footnote 726: Dutch writers claim the invention for one of their nation
in the fourteenth century (cp. M'Culloch, _Treatises_, p. 342; Rogers,
_Holland_, pp. 26, 27). There is clear evidence, however, that
fish-salting was carried on at Yarmouth as early as 1210, one Peter
Chivalier being the patentee (see Torrens M'Cullagh's _Industrial
History of the Free Nations_, 1846, ii, 29; Madox, _History of the
Exchequer_, ch. xiii, Sec. 4, p. 326, cited by him; and Macpherson, _Annals
of Commerce_, 1802, i, 384, 385). The practice was very common in
antiquity; see Schuerer, _Jewish People in the Time of Christ_, Eng. tr.
Div. ii, vol. i, p. 43.]
[Footnote 727: It is noteworthy that an English navy practically begins
with King John, in whose reign it was that fishing began to flourish at
Yarmouth. See Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, i, 374, 378, 384, 532.]
[Footnote 728: Originally the name Flanders covered only the territory
of the city of Bruges. It was extended with the extension of the domain
of the Counts of Flanders (David, _Manuel_, pp. 48, 49).]
[Footnote 729: Motley, p. 20; Grattan, pp. 38-40, 43, 56. At 1286 the
Flemish cities were represented side by side with the nobles in the
assembly of the provincial states. The same rights were acquired by the
Dutch cities in the next century.]
[Footnote 730: Dykes existed as early as the Roman period (Blok,
_Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk_, Groningen, 1892, i, 315; Eng.
tr. i, 211; Wenzelburger, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, 1878, i, 52). In
the Middle Ages co-operative bodies took the work out of the Church's
hands (Blok, pp. 315-17; tr. p. 212).]
[Footnote 731: Cp. Torrens M'Cullagh, _Industrial History_, ii, 22, 33;
Motley, p. 18. The Counts of Holland seem to have led the way in
encouraging towns and population. But Baldwin III of Flanders (_circa_
960) seems to have established yearly fairs free of tolls (De Witt,
_Memoires_, French tr., ed. 1709. part i, ch. viii, p. 34).]
[Footnote 732: Compare the so-called _Memoirs of John de Witt_, French
ed. (3e) 1709, ch. iii, p. 18; Petty, _Essays in Political Arithmetic_,
ed. 1699, p. 178; Torrens M'Cullagh, as cited, ii, 26, 113-15, 270-71;
M'Culloch, _Treatises_, p. 350. English corn was frequently exported to
the Low Countries, as against imported textiles, in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries and early in the fifteenth (Macpherson, _Annals of
Commerce_, i, 561, 644).]
[Footnote 733: Keymor, _Observations on the Dutch Fishing about the year
1601_, reprinted in _The Phoenix_, 1707, i, 223, 225; Temple,
_Observations upon the United Provinces_, cc. iii, vi (1814 ed. of
_Works_, i, 127, 163).]
[Footnote 734: Cp. De Witt, pp. 15, 16; Torrens M'Cullagh, _Industrial
History_, ii, 36, 37, 46, 59; Grattan, _Netherlands_, p. 18; Blok, as
above cited.]
[Footnote 735: As to the earlier development of the Flemish cities, cp.
Blok, _Geschiedenis_, as cited, ii, 3; Eng. tr. i, 252; A. Wauters, _Les
libertes communales_, Bruxelles, 1878, p. 746 and _passim_.]
[Footnote 736: Motley, _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, i, p. 15.]
[Footnote 737: See the charter of Middelburg in 1217, quoted by Motley,
p. 19, and by Davies, i, 65.]
[Footnote 738: Davies, _History of Holland_, i, 26.]
[Footnote 739: Cp. David, _Manuel_, p. 217; Wauters, _Les libertes
communales_, pp. 36, 287; Van Kampen, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i,
141, 142.]
[Footnote 740: M'Cullagh, ii, 42.]
[Footnote 741: De Witt (_i.e._ Delacourt), however, gives the priority
to Flanders (_Memoires_, as cited, pt. i. ch. viii, p. 34).]
[Footnote 742: The majority of the serfs seem to have been freed about
1230; and by 1300 the chiefs of the gilds were "more powerful than the
nobles" (Grattan, p. 35; cp. p. 38, and Blok, as before cited).]
[Footnote 743: Cp. David, _Manuel_, pp. 78-88.]
[Footnote 744: De Witt, as cited, pp. 34, 35; M'Cullagh, p. 66; Grattan,
p. 38.]
[Footnote 745: David, _Manuel_, pp. 142, 143; Grattan, p. 38.]
[Footnote 746: David, pp. 154-57.]
[Footnote 747: De Witt, p. 35; M'Cullagh, p. 67.]
[Footnote 748: David, _Manuel_, p. 158.]
[Footnote 749: _Id._ p. 107.]
[Footnote 750: Grattan. p. 43.]
[Footnote 751: Earle, _Philology of the English Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 8,
9.]
[Footnote 752: On this and previous floods see Blok, _Geschiedenis_, i,
313, 314; tr. i, 209, 210; Davies, vol. i, note C.]
[Footnote 753: Motley, p. 20.]
[Footnote 754: Cp. David, pp. 77, 78, 85, 92, 99, 101, 105, 108, 149;
Motley, pp. 24, 28, 29; Grattan, pp. 42, 44, 46, 50, 54, 64.]
[Footnote 755: The town of Hoorn seems to have been virtually ruined by
the punitive exactions of Charles the Bold (Davies, i, 269, 312).]
[Footnote 756: David, p. 94.]
[Footnote 757: Davies, i, 314.]
[Footnote 758: Motley, pp. 28-30.]
[Footnote 759: Largely through the union between Spain and England under
the Tudor kings (Grattan, p. 66).]
[Footnote 760: Robertson, _Charles V_, b. vi; Motley, _Rise_. Histor.
Introd. Sec. 11.]
[Footnote 761: Motley, p. 60, notes that the numbers have been put often
at fifty thousand, and sometimes even at a hundred thousand; but this,
as he admits, is incredible.]
[Footnote 762: And still the rhetorical historian, sworn to maintain the
Teutonic character for "liberty," declaims in his elementary manner that
that has been seen to be the "master passion" of the race from Caesar's
time to Charles's (Motley, p. 49; compare pp. 25-29).]
[Footnote 763: Cited by Puffendorf, _Introduction to the History of
Europe_, Eng. tr. 7th ed. 1711, i, 240.]
[Footnote 764: Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. vi, ed. cited, p. 495;
Armstrong, as cited, pp. 78-82.]
[Footnote 765: Armstrong, as cited, pp. 83, 84.]
[Footnote 766: Motley, _Rise_, p. 138.]
[Footnote 767: _Id._ pp. 138, 139; Grattan, p. 87.]
[Footnote 768: Ullmann, _Reformers before the Reformation_, Eng. tr.
1855, ii, 14-17, 172-77.]
[Footnote 769: Cp. Hooker, _Ecclesiastical Polity_, Pref. ch. viii, Sec.
12.]
[Footnote 770: Motley, _Rise_, p. 36.]
[Footnote 771: See it analysed in Motley, pp. 134, 135.]
[Footnote 772: Asked by his viceregent Margaret of Parma to introduce
the Spanish Inquisition, he pointed out that already "the Inquisition of
the Netherlands is much more pitiless than that of Spain" (Motley, p.
174; cp. p. 81).]
[Footnote 773: It was an old source of income (Davies, i, 617; cp.
Motley, p. 78).]
[Footnote 774: "The aristocracy of the Netherlands was excessively
extravagant, dissipated, and already considerably embarrassed in
circumstances" (Motley, p. 129; cp. pp. 125, 130, 131).]
[Footnote 775: Cp. Grattan, p. 106; Motley, as last cited.]
[Footnote 776: See the admissions of Motley, p. 131.]
[Footnote 777: Motley, p. 125.]
[Footnote 778: See Davies, ii, 149, 150, for a criticism of William's
development, worth considering as against the unmixed panegyric of
Motley.]
[Footnote 779: Cp. M'Cullagh, p. 211.]
[Footnote 780: Motley, pp. 462-67, 506, 527, 829.]
[Footnote 781: Van Kampen, i, 512. Camden (_Hist. of Elizabeth_, trans.
3rd ed. 1635, p. 369) states that Parma was unready to sail when called
upon, but adds that the Dutch ships of war lay so placed that he "could
not put from shore."]
[Footnote 782: While Charles V spoke all the languages of his empire,
Philip spoke only Spanish. Motley, p. 74. See the notes for a sample of
his cast of mind.]
[Footnote 783: Davies, ii, 199.]
[Footnote 784: M'Culloch (_Treatises_, p. 347) states that even in its
prosperous period Antwerp had little shipping of its own. He refers to
Guicciardini's _Descrizzione_, but I cannot trace the testimony; and
Guicciardini, while speaking of the multitudes of foreigners always at
Antwerp (French tr. ed. 1625, fol. p. 114), mentions that the population
included a great number of mariners (p. 95).]
[Footnote 785: Grattan, pp. 232, 233, 237; Davies, ii, 452-65, etc.;
Motley, _United Netherlands_, ed. 1867, iv, 537.]
[Footnote 786: Van Kampen, ii, 35.]
[Footnote 787: _Id._ p. 37.]
[Footnote 788: _Id._ p. 36.]
[Footnote 789: Motley, _Rise_, p. 149; Prescott, _Philip II_, ed. cited,
p. 659.]
[Footnote 790: Davies, ii, 304; Watson, _Hist. of Reign of Philip II_,
ed. 1839, p. 527, citing Grotius, lib. v. In 1600, however, Philip III
seems to have either acknowledged the debt to Genoa or borrowed anew to
a large amount; and at his death he is said to have doubled the debt
(Howell, _Epistolae Ho-elianae_, ed. Bennett, 1891, i, 138).]
[Footnote 791: Davies, ii, 32, 33. Cp. G. Brandt, _History of the
Reformation in the Low Countries_, Eng. tr. 1720, folio, bk. xi, i,
310.]
[Footnote 792: Cp. Motley, _Rise_, pp. 581, 646; _United Netherlands_,
iv, 558; M'Cullagh, p. 206 (where the chronology is inaccurate).]
[Footnote 793: See Motley, _Rise_, pp. 37, 38, as to the curtailment of
clerical wealth in the Netherlands from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
centuries by the feudal superiors, who, unlike their over-lords, did not
need to look to the Church for support.]
[Footnote 794: Grattan, p. 69; Davies, i, 294.]
[Footnote 795: Cp. the _Memoires de Jean De Witt_, as cited, p. 101,
ptie. ii, ch. 2.]
[Footnote 796: Grattan, p. 71.]
[Footnote 797: Davies, ii, 636. Already at the death of Charles V the
debt of the entire Netherlands was five or six million florins. At the
armistice of 1609 the debt of the province of Holland alone was
twenty-six millions. By 1648 the war was reckoned to have cost Spain in
all fifteen hundred millions. M'Cullagh, ii, 330, 331.]
[Footnote 798: Davies, ii, 290.]
[Footnote 799: Of 250 Dutchmen who sailed, however, only 90 returned.]
[Footnote 800: _Description des Pays Bas_, ed. 1625, p. 319.]
[Footnote 801: Davies, ii, 328.]
[Footnote 802: _Memoires de Jean De Witt_, as cited, p. 21.]
[Footnote 803: Davies, ii, 407. The clergy were of the war party.]
[Footnote 804: _Memoires_ cited, p. 194.]
[Footnote 805: M'Culloch, p. 353; Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_,
1804, ii, 596; Petty, _Essays_, ed. 1699, p. 165; Keymor, _Observations
made upon the Dutch Fishing about 1601_, rep. in _The Phoenix_, 1707,
i, 223.]
[Footnote 806: _Memoires_ cited, pp. 48, 50.]
[Footnote 807: Davies, iii, 556.]
[Footnote 808: Cp. Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 57.]
[Footnote 809: Latterly the regulations failed to check fraud, and even
hampered trade (M'Culloch, _Treatises_, p. 371). But for a long time the
effect was to sustain the business credit of the Dutch.]
[Footnote 810: Cp. _Memoires of Jean De Witt_, p. 103, as to
exceptions.]
[Footnote 811: Keymor, as cited, p. 224. Hamburg about the same period,
as Keymor notes, enacted that foreigners should not be allowed to sell
herrings in the port until its own boats had come in and sold theirs.]
[Footnote 812: _Essays in Political Arithmetic_, ed. 1699, p. 170. Cp.
p. 181.]
[Footnote 813: _New Discourse on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 61.]
[Footnote 814: For the years 1605-10, an average of 36 per cent; for
1616, 62-1/2 per cent.]
[Footnote 815: M'Culloch, _Treatises_, pp. 366-67, and refs. It is told
in the _Memoires de Jean De Witt_ (as cited, p. 52, _note_, ptie. i, ch.
xi) that cargoes of pepper were wilfully sunk near port.]
[Footnote 816: _Memoires_ cited, pp. 24, 51, 52.]
[Footnote 817: M'Culloch, pp. 368-69. The Dutch ideal being almost
necessarily one of small consumption and accumulation of nominal or
money capital, there was no improvement in the popular standard of
comfort.]
[Footnote 818: _Memoires_ cited, ptie. i, ch. x, xi, pp. 47, 48, 50.]
[Footnote 819: Motley, _United Netherlands_, iv, 561, 562.]
[Footnote 820: As to the stress of party spirit in Holland about this
period, see Davies, ii, 725, 726.]
[Footnote 821: See hereinafter, pt. vi, ch. ii, Sec. 5.]
[Footnote 822: Davies, ii, 721; Van Kampen, ii, 149. Cp. Temple, _Essay
upon the Advancement of Trade in Ireland_, Works, iii, 15, 16.]
[Footnote 823: _Memoires de Jean De Witt_, ptie. ii, ch. ii, iii (iii,
iv). It is there noted (ch. ii, p. 113) that when in time of war the
States-General gave letters of marque to privateers there were always
bitter complaints that the Dutch privateers took Dutch goods as well as
the enemy's. Again it is asked (p. 163), "What plunder is there for us
to gain at sea when we are almost the only traffickers?"]
[Footnote 824: It is to be noted that De Witt diverged fatally from the
doctrine of his friend Delacourt in thus leaning to foreign alliances,
which Delacourt altogether opposed. See Lefevre Pontalis, _Jean De
Witt_, 1884, i, 317-18, where an interesting account of the _Memoires_
is given.]
[Footnote 825: Davies, iii, 68, 69; Rogers, _Holland_, p. 266. Temple
was of course the unconscious instrument of the treachery of Charles.
Cp. Lefevre Pontalis, _Jean De Witt_, i, 451-55.]
[Footnote 826: See the Declaration and the Dutch reply, printed in 1674,
reprinted in _The Phoenix_, 1707, i, 271 _sq._]
[Footnote 827: Cp. Child, _New Discourse of Trade_, 4th ed. pref. pp.
xx-xxv; Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. pp. 28, 47-57.]
[Footnote 828: Cp. Grattan, p. 75.]
[Footnote 829: "Never any country traded so much and consumed so little;
they buy infinitely, but it is to sell again." "They furnish infinite
luxury, which they never practise, and traffic in pleasures which they
never taste" (Temple, _Observations_, 1814 ed. of _Works_, i, 176). Cp.
Motley, _United Netherlands_, iv, 559. Sometimes the citizens were taxed
fifty per cent on their incomes.]
[Footnote 830: M'Culloch's dictum that the low rate of interest in
Holland was wholly due to heavy taxation is an evident fallacy, framed
in the interest of _laissez-faire_.]
[Footnote 831: It was a common saying at Amsterdam in the seventeenth
century that every dish of fish was paid for once to the fisherman and
six times to the State. As early as 1619 taxes on goods were nearly
equal to their wholesale price (Howell, letter of May 1, 1619, in
_Epistolae Ho-elianae_, Bennett's ed. 1891, vol. i, 27). See _La Richesse
de Hollande_, 1778, ii, 21-42, for details of the extraordinary
multiplication of Dutch taxes from the war-period onwards. In Temple's
time a common fish-sauce paid thirty different duties (_Observations_,
in _Works_, i, 187). And still taxes increased. Cp. Smith, _Wealth of
Nations_, M'Culloch's ed. 1839, pp. 396, 397, 411.]
[Footnote 832: So Seeley, _Expansion of England_, p. 132.]
[Footnote 833: See the Dissertation drawn up on this occasion (1750),
Eng. tr. 1751. It is largely quoted from by M'Culloch, _Treatises_, pp.
354-62.]
[Footnote 834: Wenzelburger, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i, 51.]
[Footnote 835: Laing, _Notes of a Traveller_, 1842, p. 15.]
[Footnote 836: Rogers, _Holland_, pp. 362, 363.]
[Footnote 837: Rogers, p. 365.]
[Footnote 838: See Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iv, ch. v, as to the
British encouragement of fisheries in the eighteenth century.]
[Footnote 839: Crawford, _Eastern Archipelago_, iii, 388; (cited by
M'Culloch, p. 365); Temminck, _Possessions Neerlandaises dans l'Inde
Archipelagique_, 1847-49, iii, 202-11.]
[Footnote 840: M'Culloch, p. 363.]
[Footnote 841: _Wealth of Nations_, bk. ii, ch. v, _end_.]
[Footnote 842: Keymor, _Observations on the Dutch Fishing_, in _The
Phoenix_, as cited, p. 231.]
[Footnote 843: _Epistolae Ho-elianae_, Bennett's ed. 1891, i, 25.]
[Footnote 844: Child, _New Discourses of Trade_, 4th ed. p. 88. Cp.
Menzel, _Gesch. der Deutschen_, cap. 491, _note_, citing Browne's work
of 1668.]
[Footnote 845: _Notes of a Traveller_, p. 10.]
[Footnote 846: As to these see Motley, _Rise_, pp. 46-48. He admits that
they were set up by French culture-contacts. But cp. Grattan, p. 75.]
[Footnote 847: Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii, 249.]
[Footnote 848: _Id._ iv, 1.]
[Footnote 849: Cp. Biedermann, as cited in the author's _Buckle and his
Critics_, pp. 169-73.]
[Footnote 850: Van Kampen, i, 608, 609.]
[Footnote 851: Her works were issued in 1528, 1540, and 1567.]
[Footnote 852: Cp. Mr. Gosse's article on Dutch literature, in _Ency.
Brit._ 10th ed. vol. xii.]
[Footnote 853: As to this see Cerisier, vi, 267.]
[Footnote 854: Van Kampen, i, 607, 608; ii, 106; Motley, _United
Netherlands_, iv, 570.]
[Footnote 855: Wenzelburger, i, 54.]
[Footnote 856: Motley, _United Netherlands_, iv, 556.]
[Footnote 857: At 1829 it was only 2,613,487.]
[Footnote 858: Some of course were destroyed by various causes. Rubens's
"Descent from the Cross" at Antwerp, though repeatedly retouched, was
ruined when Reynolds saw it; but the number of good pictures preserved
in the Low Countries is immense.]
[Footnote 859: In 1833 there were 2,270,959 hectares of land = 8,768
square miles. In 1877 there were 3,297,268 hectares = 12,731 square
miles--the result of systematic reclamation from sea and river.]
[Footnote 860: Population in 1897 slightly over 5,000,000; at the end of
1910, 5,945,155.]
[Footnote 861: Compare, however, the verdict of Laing, cited above, p.
325.]
[Footnote 862: An increase of some seven millions since 1900.]
[Footnote 863: Chief crops rye, oats, potatoes.]
[Footnote 864: The clear exports are chiefly margarine, butter, cheese,
sugar, leather, paper, manufactured woollen and cotton cloths, flax,
vegetables, potato-flour, oxen, and sheep. In 1891 Great Britain
imported from the Netherlands L3,093,595 worth of margarine and L770,460
worth of butter; in 1909, L2,782,636 worth and L843,318 worth
respectively; while sugar stood at L2,043,724. Oil seed rose from
L345,210 in 1909 to L721,266 in 1910; and condensed milk in the latter
year stood at L795,937.]
[Footnote 865: Increases of 5,000 men and 1,300 boats since 1900.]
[Footnote 866: An increase of 143 since 1900.]
[Footnote 867: An increase of 2,206 (over 100 per cent.) since 1891.]
[Footnote 868: This source of wealth, as we have seen, was much
curtailed in the eighteenth century by British competition. Laing
(_Notes_, pp. 7, 8) shows how small it had become at his time, but is
quite mistaken in assuming that it had never been great.]
[Footnote 869: About 60 per cent. of the revenue is from Government
produce and monopolies.]
[Footnote 870: The communes make provision only where charity does not;
there is no poor-rate.]