America, which differs so widely from the mother country, might show rational and historical reasons for being different. And yet, with floods of light pouring in from every quarter, and while scholars are rewriting the history of almost every country on the globe, so powerful has been the current of popular opinion that the story of early Colonial America, in this particular, stands today substantially where Bancroft left it fifty years ago. The attempt is still made by the great majority of writers to trace everything American to an English source; and when that search proves fruitless, resort is had to the inventive genius of the inspired first settlers, and to that alone. But, as I have already suggested, it is not American history alone which has suffered from ignoring the existence of the Netherland Republic, and its influence upon the modern world. Carlyle, in his Introduction to the "Letters and Speeches of Cromwell," says: "One wishes there were a History of English Puritanism, the last of all our Heroisms; but sees small prospect of such a thing at present. Few nobler Heroisms, at bottom perhaps no nobler Heroism ever transacted itself on this Earth; and it lies as good as lost to us; overwhelmed under such an avalanche of Human Stupidities as no Heroism before ever did. Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. . . . The Rushworths, Whitlockes, Nalsons, Thur loes; enormous folios, these and many others have been printed, and some of them again printed, but never yet edited-edited as you edit wagon-loads of broken bricks and dry mortar, simply by tumbling up the wagon." Many persons besides Carlyle have probably wished for a history of English Puritanism. But this Heroism, like that of the making of the United States, will remain unexplained and unintelligible just so long as it is looked upon as a mere chapter of English history, and not as an outcome or continuation of that great Continental movement, intellectual and spiritual, which, in the sixteenth century, revolutionized the world. Neither can be understood, unless we recognize the true intellectual, moral, and religious condition of the English people, out of which their Puritanism, with all its faults and virtues, was evolved, and appreciate the influence which must have been exerted upon such a people by the close proximity of a republic the leader of the world by at least a century in agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, and by more than two centuries in all ideas relating to civil and religious liberty. To the American this appreciation should not be a task of difficulty if he enters upon the subject with a mind free of prejudice. He has seen how, in his own time, the existence of the American Republic has affected the people of Central and South America, and how its influence has been exerted even across the ocean upon the nations of Continental Europe. He, therefore, of all others, should be capable of understanding how the Dutch Republic must have affected those heroic men in England and America who, in their newly awakened intellectual life, were trying to break the shackles of civil and religious tyranny. Writing the history of English Puritanism without any allusion to this influence is much like writing the early history of England without referring to the ideas brought in by the Norman conquerors, or a history of the Renaissance in Italy without mentioning the influence of the classic authors of Greece. But in the case of America and its Puritans even these comparisons are inadequate. Another illustration will, perhaps, be more apposite. Let the reader imagine that Japan, instead of sending a few score of students to the United States, had sent over many thousand families, and had kept five or six thousand soldiers in our army for some forty years; and that during the same period a hundred thousand Americans had settled in Japan itself. Imagine, further, that at the end of the forty years a number of the Japanese settlers in America had started out to found a colony in some newly discovered land, and that there had been added to their ranks a large number of Americans and some twenty thousand other Japanese, some of whom had lived in America, and most of the others going from sections in which Americans had been living for many years. These colonists found a mighty state, whose people speak Japanese, but have almost no Japanese institutions, having established a republic, and copied their institutions mainly from the United States. The writer who after two centuries should sit down to compose a history of this new republic, and, omitting all reference to the United States, credit these settlers with the invention of their unJapanese institutions, would be simply following the example of the English, and most of the American, authors who have written of America and her institutions. * The foregoing suggestions as to the influence of Holland upon England and America may appear strange to persons who have been accustomed to regard the Hollanders as "stupid Dutchmen." Washington Irving burlesqued those who settled New York in a book which, although written in his boyish days, and in later years admitted by him to be a "coarse caricature," fitted in with the English prejudice, and in some quarters has almost become accepted history. He depicted them as besotted with beer and narcotized by tobacco, illmannered, clownish, and objects only of ridicule. Many persons know nothing of them except from this travesty. What a contrast is presented by the facts!† * "Life of Irving," by his Nephew, i. 183. In 1668, Colonel Francis Lovelace wrote from New York, in a private letter to King Charles II.: "I find some of these people have the breeding of courts, and I cannot conceive how such is acquired." Lamb's "History of the City of New York," i. 243. This letter was written shortly after the province had passed from the dominion of the Dutch West India Company, which had been its owners for half a century. The writer was an Englishman, the official representative of the Duke of York, the new proprietor. He had sailed up the Hudson to Esopus and Albany, remaining there a week; had explored Long Island; had been fêted in the infant capital; everywhere had seen the leading families; and after this examination wrote his letter to the king. He evidently had met different people from those bred in the fertile imagination of Irving. Motley, the historian of the Netherlanders, himself a New-Englander, says that they were "the most energetic and quick-witted people of the world." Guicciardini, an Italian, who lived among them for forty years, said, in 1563, of their inventive faculty: "They have a special and happy talent for the ready invention of all sorts of machines, ingenious and suitable for facilitating, shortening, and despatching everything they do, even in the matter of cooking." Here is the Yankee of Europe. Taine, a Frenchman, fully acquainted with English institutions, says: "At this moment, 1609, Holland, on the sea and in the world, is what England was in the time of Napoleon.*** Internally their government is as good as their external position is exalted. For the first time in the world, conscience is free and the rights of the citizens are respected. * * * In culture and instruction, as well as in the arts of organization and government, the Dutch are two centuries ahead of the rest of Europe."* It must now be remembered by the reader that when America was settled the Netherland Republic was a great power in Europe, with a population about as large as that of England, and one incomparably wealthier. When all this was unthought of, and when original documents were inaccessible, historians were hardly blameworthy who ignored the influence of Holland upon England and America. But now no such excuse exists. To history the words of Joubert are particularly applicable: "Ignorance, which in matters of morals ex * "Art in the Netherlands," Durand's translation, pp. 166, 169, |