Windmills and Wooden Shoes

by Blair Jaekel

The shaded portions of this map of Holland and its immediate surroundings represent land that would be under water if by some inconceivable catastrophe all the dikes should break. The map gives, therefore, some idea of the never-ending struggle that the Hollander has faced and continues to face.

The surface of the territory to the eastward of the imaginary longitude is barely scratched by the searcher of the picturesque and historical. Many of its towns are as interesting as any of those in the west, but, as a general rule, their peoples have been more easily influenced by German and Belgian methods, and, therefore, their characteristics differ greatly from those of the natives of North and South Holland and Zeeland, for example. What evidences of their history and art these towns still possess they have in a great measure failed to appreciate themselves, and it is this lack of self-confidence, translated into a complete failure so far to advertise their own scenic and historical virtues, that has bred the comparative aloofness with respect to them in the manner of the tourist through Holland. Probably the majority of travelers go to the Netherlands, not for art, nor for scenery, nor even for history, but for windmills and wooden shoes (to epitomize the characteristics of the country and its peoples), and for that reason their wanderings are bound to be confined, for the most part, to the exiguous territory bordered by the North Sea on the west and the Zuyder Zee on the east.

The omnipresent story of Holland is the story of its fight against the waters. Its other conquests pale before it. Its eighty years’ revolution against the Spaniards cannot compare with it. Water is Holland’s perpetual and merciless enemy; so much so that if all the dikes that protect her from the waters of the ocean burst to-night, to-morrow there would be but a third of the country left. How she has conquered would fill a book in itself. Since the Frisian monks first commenced to dike in the country, successive inundations have blotted out the lives of more of her people than all her conquests at arms put together. But still the Dutch fought on, resolutely, unflinchingly, persistently, until they dredged what land they needed from the bottom of the sea and grew grass and flowers and vegetables where kelp and cockle-shells thrived before. After hundreds of years of dredging and diking, by 1833 Holland had attained an acreage of 8,768 square miles. By 1877 she had added another four thousand.

Characteristic of the Dutch perseverance to conquer the menacing waters is a part of the report of the commission appointed to superintend the reclamation of the Haarlemermeer, an inland sea that once lapped the very gates of Amsterdam herself and upon which a fleet of seventy vessels once gave battle. “We have driven forever from the bosom of our country a most dangerous enemy,” said the commission, after its task had been completed; “we have at the same time augmented the means for defending our capital in time of war. We have conquered a province in combat without tears and without blood, where science and genius took the place of generals, and where workmen were the worthy soldiers.”

Previous to 1836 the Dutch had tolerated the Haarlemermeer. In November of that year a violent west wind lashed its waters into a fury and poured them into the streets of Amsterdam. On Christmas day there came an east wind that drove the waters from Amsterdam over into the streets of Leyden. This was too much. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. This was what exhausted even the patience of the Dutch, and they picked up the gauntlet. They contrived a plan of methodical, systematic attack. They diked in the Lake with a high earthen cofferdam, installed a series of powerful pumps that sucked a thousand cubic feet of water at a single stroke of the piston, and they drew 800,000,000 tons of lake water up into the surrounding canals to be carried off to the sea with much the same complacency that you would imbibe a glass of soda through a straw. It took more than four years to complete the process. When it was finally finished the Dutch struck a medal in commemoration which bore in Latin the following matter-of-fact inscription: “Haarlem Lake, after having for centuries assailed the surrounding fields to enlarge itself by their destruction, conquered at last by the force of machinery, has returned to Holland its 44,280 acres of invaded land.” The significance of the Dutch bon mot, “God made the sea; we made the shore,” will never be more apparent than when you look out from the car window across the Zuidplaspolder near Rotterdam, with a minus altitude of more than thirty feet below the level of the ocean at mean tide.

Holland being, as a whole, the lowest country in the world, is protected at the danger zones by the great dikes upon which almost the entire kingdom depends for its safety from disastrous inundation, and which require the annual cost of maintenance of approximately $12,000,000 and the undivided attention of a whole department of engineers. The mileage of the canals which intersect the country in every direction is greater than the mileage of the railroads. First and all the time, these canals, except those constructed for special purposes, serve for conducting the superfluous water from the cultivated areas. Second, they are highways for traffic. Travel on them is cheaper than on the steam tram lines, which is cheaper, in turn, than on the railways, for many of the latter are owned and operated by private companies, as in England. Even some of the lines built by the State are leased to a private concern. But unlike those of England, there can be little doubt that an investment in their stocks is a paying one, because railway building and railway up-keep in Holland are comparative sinecures. Grades are unknown, curves are scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth, except in the approaches to a city, and I failed to find a tunnel in the whole country.

But touring in Holland is not so cheap as it is either in Germany or France. The unit basis of Dutch coinage is the gulden, of value equal to slightly more than two francs and just less than two marks. There is even an oft repeated but exaggerated saying that a gulden in Holland will only go as far as a mark in Germany. One of the reasons for the expensiveness of travel through the Netherlands is that to stop at any but the so-called first-class hostelries is a rather precarious business. In spite of all the Dutchman’s reputation for cleanliness, the less expensive hotels, unlike their ilk in Germany or Switzerland, are often anything but scrupulous in this matter and sometimes shockingly unsanitary.

The system of Dutch municipal government is almost identical with that of Germany, the Burgomaster, or Mayor, being appointed by the crown instead of being elected by the community, so that a man may follow the profession of burgomastering as he would that of engineering. It is, withal, a system that might well supplant that in vogue in American cities, and if the experimental stages of municipal government by commission—lately tentatively adopted in some few cases as an expedient to do away with political bartering for executive positions—if this form of government proves its worth, the professional mayor may yet become with us a reality.

School attendance for children is compulsory in the Netherlands, but not free. The equivalent of eight American cents is the charge imposed by the State for one week’s tuition for one child in the primary grades, with stipulated increments added to the fee as the pupil advances. All schools are under the supervision of the State, and if a family is found too poor to pay the school taxes on its children, the fees are remitted. The trade school, however, of late inauguration, has revolutionized the old-time classical education to a great degree.