Chapter IV: Holland (2)

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 Münster 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 (_Mémoires 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, _Étude 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]

§ 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 Münster 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.

§ 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.

§ 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.

§ 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 £97,000,000 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 £1,000,000; 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, § 4, p. 326, cited by him; and Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, 1802, i, 384, 385). The practice was very common in antiquity; see Schürer, _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, _Mémoires_, 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 libertés 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 libertés 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 (_Mémoires_, 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. § 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 Cæsar'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, § 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, _Epistolæ Ho-elianæ_, 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 _Mémoires 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: _Mémoires de Jean De Witt_, as cited, p. 21.]

[Footnote 803: Davies, ii, 407. The clergy were of the war party.]

[Footnote 804: _Mémoires_ 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: _Mémoires_ 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. _Mémoires 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 _Mémoires de Jean De Witt_ (as cited, p. 52, _note_, ptie. i, ch. xi) that cargoes of pepper were wilfully sunk near port.]

[Footnote 816: _Mémoires_ 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.]