THE word“Netherlands”,which is only used on very official occasions, means exactly what it implies, a combination of“low”localities situated from two to sixteen feet below the level of the sea. A single good flood of prehistoric dimensions, and Amsterdam and Rotterdam and all the most important cities would disappear from the face of the earth.

But this apparent natural weakness of the country has also been the source of its greatest strength. For among these marshes along the banks of the North Sea it was not sufficient for Man to take hold of the country.Ere he could do that, he was obliged to create it, and in that uneven conquest between human ingenuity and the relentless forces of Nature, the Dutch people were triumphant.It taught them to be hard and watchful.In the sort of world in which we happen to live, those qualities are not without merit.

When the Romans visited this distant and lonely part of Europe(which they did about fifty years before the beginning of our era),the entire region consisted of bogs and marshes protected against the ravages of the North Sea by that slender row of sand dunes which stretched all the way from Belgium to Denmark. These dunes were interrupted at irregular intervals by a large number of rivers and rivulets.Most important among the rivers were the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt.Left entirely to their own devices and not hindered by any dikes, these three rivers did exactly what they pleased, and every spring they altered their course and created islands where no islands had ever been before and swept away vast tracts of land that had seemed as solid as the island of Manhattan.I am not exaggerating.Upon one memorable occasion in the thirteenth century, seventy villages and almost a hundred thousand people disappeared from view in the course of a single night.

Compared to their Flemish neighbors who lived on solid ground, these early Hollanders lived a very miserable existence;but a mysterious change, either in the temperature of the water or the salt percentage of the Baltic, gave them their chance. One day absolutely unexpectedly, the fish known as the herring moved from the Baltic into the North Sea.In an age when all the people of Europe were obliged to eat fish on Fridays and when fish as a staple diet of the human race was of much greater importance than it is today, this meant absolute ruin to a large number of Baltic cities and the sudden rise of a corresponding number of Dutch towns, which now began to supply southern Europe with that dried fish which then took the place of our canned goods of today.Out of the herring fisheries came the grain trade, and out of the grain trade grew the commerce with the spice islands of India.There was nothing extraordinary in this.It was the normal development of a commercial state.

But when fate, regardless of all practical considerations, incorporated the Low Countries into the empire of the Habsburgs and decreed that a nation of lusty peasants and fishermen, without any of the graces of life, but tough-fisted and very practical-minded, should be administered by sour officials trained at the court of an absolute monarch who dwelled somewhere in dignified loneliness among the bleak hills of his windswept Spanish Castle-land, then there was bound to be trouble. That trouble expressed itself in a struggle for liberty which lasted eighty years and which ended with a complete victory for the inhabitants of the Low Countries.

The rulers of the newly-founded state, being practical men of affairs, believed sincerely in the principle of live and let live, especially when it meant a profit to them. They therefore offered their hospitality and their protection to all those who in less fortunate countries were being persecuted for their beliefs, religious or otherwise.Most of these refugees(with the exception of a small group of obscure English dissenters, who however did not stay very long)became loyal subjects of the country that had given them the chance to start upon a new and happier career.As a rule their former masters had deprived them of all their liquid assets and had confiscated their savings.But they carried their old ability with them wherever they went, and they contributed most generously to the commercial and intellectual development of their adopted fatherland.And when the war of independence was over, a million people, living in little cities built on the bottom of some old lake or inland sea, boldly assumed the leadership of Europe and Asia and maintained that position for three generations.

Then they invested their money—bought themselves large country estates, foreign pictures(which are of course always so much better than those painted by the talent at home)and spent their days being respectable. They did their best to make their neighbors forget where the money had come from, and very soon the money forgot to come too.For nothing in this world can afford to stand still, least of all our human energy.And those who won't make an effort to hold what they have got will soon lose all, and that goes for ideas as well as for ducats.

The end came during the beginning of the nineteenth century. Napol-eon, who knew only as much geography as he needed to win his battles, claimed that since the Low Countries were merely a delta formed by three French rivers, the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, the country belonged by right of geological descent to the empire of the French.A large N scrawled at the bottom of a piece of paper undid the work of three entire centuries.Holland disappeared from the map and became a French province.

In 1815 however the country regained its independence and went back to work. The colonial heritage, sixty-two times as large as the mother coun-try, has allowed towns like Amsterdam and Rotterdam to maintain them-selves quite successfully as centers for the distribution of Indian products.Holland has never been an industrial country.It has no raw materials except a little coal of very indifferent quality in the extreme south.It is therefore not able to provide its own colonies with more than six percent of all their imports.But the development of the tea and coffee and rubber and quinine plantations in Java and Sumatra and the Moluccas and Borneo and the Celebes demands vast amounts of capital.This fact is responsible for the leading position of the Amsterdam stock-exchange, and the importance of Amster-dam as a place where people and nations go to borrow money, while the necessity of carrying all this merchandise to and from Europe made it possible for the Netherlands to remain fifth on the list of national tonnage.

The tonnage of the vessels used for the trade at home is higher than that of any other country. The country is honeycombed with convenient waterways and the canal-boat is the most dangerous rival of the railroad as it can be operated at a minimum of cost in a country where, until recently, the time element did not play a very important role in the daily affairs of men, women, cows, horses and dogs.

A great many of those canals are really drainage ditches, for one-quarter of the kingdom's territory is no land at all, in the usual sense of the word, but merely a piece of the bottom of the sea reclaimed from the fishes and the seals by endless labor and kept dry by artificial means and perpetual watchfulness. Since the year 1450 thousands of square miles of land have been added to the country by the draining of marshes and by turning lakes into“polders”.To make such a polder is really very easy if you know how.First of all, you build a dike around the piece of water you have doomed for destruction and on the outside of that dike you dig a wide and deep canal, which is connected with the nearest river into which it can pour its daily surplus by means of a complicated system of locks.When that has been done, you construct a few dozen windmills on the top of that big dike and furnish them with a pumping machine.The wind or a small gasoline engine will then do the rest.When all the water has been pumped out of the lake and has been pumped into the canal, you dig a number of parallel ditches across your new“polder”and, provided you keep your pumping-mills and pumping-stations working all of the time, these canals will then take care of the necessary drainage.

Some of these polders are quite large and are inhabited by as many as twenty thousand people. If the Zuyder Zee ever gets dried up(the affair may prove a little too costly, now that every nation is on the verge of bankruptcy)there will be room for at least a hundred thousand more.As fully one-quarter of the country consists of such polders, you will easily understand how it happens that the Dutch Department of Rivers, Canals and Dikes disposes of more money every year than any of the other sub-divisions of the government.

In strange contrast with the high fertility of this low part of the country, the higher regions of the east, where the central European plain met the sea before the formation of the big, marshy delta of the Rhine and the Meuse and the Scheldt, is of very little use to anybody. For thousands of years it was an unloading station for the boulders and the pebbles of the northern European glaciers.In some ways the soil resembles that of New England, only it is much more sandy and it gives the statistics of the Kingdom of the Netherlands that queer twist which allows a country with a density of population of 625 per square mile(France has only 191,Russia 17)to carry a ballast of more than 25% of its total area as“territory which is essentially unproductive”,(In France the percentage is less than fifteen and in Germany less than nine.)

And this curiously sharp line of demarcation between east and west and fertile and infertile also accounts for the presence of the more important towns in a single small triangle right in the heart of the polder-land. Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, the Hague, Delft and Rotterdam are so close to each other as to form practically one large city and all of them lie close to the protecting bulwark of those famous sand dunes, at the foot of which the Dutch of three centuries ago began to raise and to perfect the pretty little bulbs of a flower called“Tulipa”which their merchants had brought back from Persia and Armenia.

The city of Athens was only as large as eight New York City blocks. Any wheezy old flivver will carry you from one end of Holland to the other in a few hours.And yet, next to the territory of Attica, this narrow strip of land between the Rhine, the North Sea and the Zuyder Zee has probably contributed more to the sum total of our arts and sciences than any other region of similar diminutive proportions.Athens was a barren rock and Holland was a water-logged swamp.But they had two things in common when they suddenly leaped into fame—an excellent geographic location from the point of view of international commerce, and a superabundance of animal spirits and spiritual curiosity, left over from the days when they had been obliged to fight or perish.And out of these their glory was born.