Added to this were the Hollander's respect for the pri vate rights of all classes; his devotion to art and learning; his love of fair dealing in personal and in public matters; his industry, frugality; and, finally, his universal toleration. A man with these traits of character, although sympathetic with the English Puritan on many points, was hardly comprehensible to the ruling classes in England two centuries and a half ago. No one could deny the Dutchmen's courage, for they were among the boldest soldiers and sailors that the world has ever seen; but they were not gentlemen from the aristocratic point of view.

As for the Englishmen of the Restoration, one little incident will illustrate what they thought high breeding. Sir William Temple, as is well known, was one of the most elegant and accomplished gentlemen at the Court of Charles II.-a wit among the courtiers, and a courtier among the wits.* Being sent as ambassador to The Hague, he fortunately jotted down some of his experiences, and among others the following. Dining one day with the Chief Burgomaster of Amsterdam, and having a severe cold, he noticed that every time he spit on the floor, while at table, a tight, handsome wench, who stood in a corner holding a cloth, got down on her knees and wiped it up. Seeing this, he turned to his host and apologized for the trouble which he gave, receiving the jocular response, "It is well for you that

and as little forgiven by the "merry monarch" as was the stern discipline to which he was subjected in Scotland during his early life. Rogers's "Story of Holland," p. 257; Davies, iii. 12. No reader needs to be reminded how many of the noble families of England are descended from illegitimate scions of royalty, and how they prize their ancestry.

* Macaulay's Essays, "Sir William Temple."

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my wife is not home, for she would have turned you out of the house for soiling her floor, although you are the English ambassador." This incident, he says, "illustrates the authority of women in Holland." That it conveyed no other lesson to his mind gives us a better idea of the manners of the English upper classes two centuries ago than pages of description.* Hallam, writing of England in the time of Elizabeth, says: "Hypocritical adulation was so much among the vices of that age, that the want of it passed for rudeness." + It was this form of rudeness in the Hollander, and not what would be called bad manners to-day, that was found objectionable by the English.

When we now remember that England and Holland became commercial rivals, and that England has never scrupled at anything to crush out a competitor, we need not wonder at the national prejudice towards the Dutchman, whose virtues, developed under a republic, were a standing protest against a government for the upper classes alone. In 1673, Chancellor Shaftesbury, in an address to Parliament, summed up the whole case against Holland. It was an enemy of all monarchies, especially the English; their only competitor in commerce and naval power, and the chief obstacle to the universal dominion which England should aim at: Delenda esto Carthago. Such a government must be destroyed.‡

Such, in brief outline, is the origin of the Englishman's antipathy to the Dutch; an antipathy which in great

* "Memoirs of what Passed in Christendom from 1672 to 1679," Sir William Temple's Works, ii. 458. See also Felltham's "Resolves;" "Observations on the Low Countries," 12th ed. (London, 1709), p. 609.

+"Const. Hist." i. 277.

"Parlt. Hist." vol. iv. col. 504, cited by Davies.

measure had led to a general disparagement of this people, and thus to obscuring the truth of history; although to such an exhibition of national prejudice there have always been illustrious exceptions.*

That the American of English descent should, in former times, have shown some of this prejudice is in no ways remarkable, since he knew little of the facts. But his indulgence in the disparagement at the present day, when all the records are accessible, is a very different matter, for it is to the country of this republican people,

* What some of the able Englishmen of the seventeenth century thought of them will be shown in a late chapter. As to those of modern times, the first whom we may notice is Samuel Rogers, the poet. He, in the notes to his "Italy," pays a high tribute to the Dutch Republic, as superior to Venice, saying that it produced "not only the greatest seamen, but the greatest lawyers, the greatest physicians, the most accomplished scholars, the most skilful painters, and statesmen as wise as they were just." Hallam, an able and certainly not a prejudiced judge, says that Holland, "at the end of the sixteenth century and for many years afterwards, was pre-eminently the literary country of Europe," and all through the seventeenth century was the peculiarly learned country also. The Dutch were "a great people, a people fertile of men of various ability and erudition, a people of scholars, of theologians and philosophers, of mathematicians, of historians, and we may add of poets."-Hallam's "Literature of Europe," iii. 278, iv. 59. Macaulay, writing of the period just before the English revolution of 1688, says that the aspect of Holland “produced on English travellers of that age an effect similar to the effect which the first sight of England now produces on a Norwegian or a Canadian." "History of England," chap. ii. Still fuller is the tribute of the last English writer upon Holland, a member of Parliament and a professor of political economy at Oxford. He claims that the revolt of the Netherlands and the success of Holland is the beginning of modern civilization, the Dutch having taught Europe nearly everything which it knows. "The Story of Holland," by James E. Thorold Rogers, pp. 10, 11.

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in many respects so like his own, but so different from England, that he must turn if he would understand the making of the United States.

Nor is it only to the republicans of America or the students of the past that this country is of interest. The story of the rise and development of the Netherlands should be known to every one who cares about the political, social, and economic questions which now agitate the world. Does one wish to see what local self-government can do for a people, nowhere can he find a better example of its strength than in the cities which made up the great Netherland Republic. Does he, on the other hand, wish to see the weakness of a federation in which the general government does not deal directly with the citizen, but only with organic bodies of the State; nowhere, not even in the confederation which preceded our American Union, will he find a better illustration than that afforded by the same republic in its early days. When we turn to other questions, social and economic, a still broader field is opened up. The history of this country, when rightly understood, probably disposes of more popular delusions and throws more light upon the future of democracy than that of any other country in the world. However, as it has been the interest of the so-called upper classes to foster these delusions, perhaps we should not wonder at the little attention bestowed upon this history.

What, for example, becomes of the standing arguments for an aristocracy and for men of leisure when we turn on them the light from Holland? English writers are accustomed to tell us that art and science owe their encouragement to the existence of the noble orders, and that but for their example fine manners and

lofty thought would vanish from the earth. Nowhere can be found a better illustration of the defective reasoning which draws general conclusions from insufficient data. In England, this has appeared to be the fact, because in that country the aristocracy have largely absorbed the wealth and education which enable men to foster art and science. Yet England, until a very recent day at least, has done almost nothing for art, and in science and deep scholarship could never be compared with Holland in her palmy days. But Holland owed her pre-eminence in these departments, not to an aristocracy, nor even to a moneyed class whose inherited wealth led them to abstain from business. The men who sustained her painters and musicians, who fostered science and broad learning, were the plain burghers in the cities, merchants, and manufacturers, men whom Queen Elizabeth called "base mechanicals," who all worked themselves, and by example or by precept taught that labor alone is honorable. In this connection a single incident will show how mathematics were cultivated in the Netherlands.

In 1617, a young French soldier, serving in the Dutch army, was passing through the streets of Breda. A crowd was gathered on a corner, and he pushed forward to learn the cause of the excitement. Its members were

all studying a paper posted on a wall, and talking about its contents. As he did not understand the language, he asked a by-stander to translate it for him into French or Latin. The paper contained an abstruse mathematical problem, which in this way had been submitted to the public for solution. The soldier obtained his translation, went to his quarters, and a few days afterwards sent in the correct answer, signed "Descartes." This was the introduction to the world of the greatest philos