Messrs. A. and B., honourable merchants from Amsterdam, enter into a partnership. A. goes to London and as an Englishman enters business. B. stays at home. A. equips a privateer. B. loads a ship and gets as much insurance as he possibly can. The ship of B. leaves the Dutch harbour and is captured by the ship of A. It is taken to England and ship and cargo are publicly sold. A. gets the profits of his buccaneering expedition. B. collects the insurance. The partners have in this way made twice the amount of their original investment, minus the insignificant loss on the ship. At the end of the year the two merchants divide the spoils and both get rich. This method had the disadvantage of being too easy. A deadly competition set in. Finally the insurance companies discovered the swindle and refused to insure. That stopped the business.
From that moment on the only way of doing business across the water was to take the risk of capture, to try to run the blockade of the British fleet in the North Seas and reach some safe foreign port. When the year 1801 came hardly a dozen ships which flew the Dutch flag dared to cross the ocean. Not a single whaler was seen off the coast of Greenland; the Dutch fishermen had deserted the North Sea; the channel was closed to Dutch trade; the Mediterranean, where once Dutch had been a commonly understood language, did not see any Dutch ships for many years; the Baltic, the scene of the first Dutch commercial triumphs, no longer witnessed the appearance of the Dutch grain carrier who during so many centuries had provided the daily bread for millions of people. This disappearance of the commercial fleet meant the absolute ruin of many industries which up to that time had been kept alive by such demand as there was for planed wood, nets, rope, tar, and the countless things which went into the making of the old sailing-ship. The eighteenth century had been a bad period for these industries. The beginning nineteenth century killed them. The great manufacturing centres like Leiden and Haarlem became the famous villes mortes about which we like to read, but in which we do not care to live. Hollow streets, grass growing between the cobblestones, a few old families slowly dwindling away and using up the funds of former generations; a population ill fed and badly housed, physically degenerating and morally perishing under the load of philanthropy by which it was kept alive; the whole life of the city, once exuberant and open, retiring to the back room where the sinful world cannot be seen; where, around the family tea table, and with the patriarchal pipe, dull resignation is found in that same Bible which once, and not so many years before, had inspired their ancestors to a display of vitality and of energetic enterprise which has been unsurpassed in European history. All optimism gone to make place for a leaden despondency and a feeling that no attempt of the individual can avail against the higher decrees of a cruel Providence. It is a terrible picture. It remained true for almost three generations. Let us be grateful that we in our own day have seen the last of it.
Dutch ships frozen in the ice
In the colonies, as has been said before, the same state of ruin existed as at home. The West India Company had been bankrupt for almost a score of years. The colonies in South America, the rich sugar plantations for which once we sacrificed the unprofitable harbour of New York, were in the year 1801 being worked for the benefit of the British conqueror. Holland had lost them and had lost their profits. In the year 1798, by article 247 of the first constitution, the East India Company had been suspended. This enormous commercial institution, which with a minimum of effort had produced a maximum of results, went out of existence like a candle. Her loss was a terrible blow to Amsterdam. During the last years, when the affairs of the company were going from bad to worse, many loans had been taken up to meet the current expenses. Amsterdam, which had the greatest interest in hiding the actual condition of the company, had invariably provided these loans. Its City Bank still had an inexhaustible supply of cash, but with her trade in foreign securities ruined by the long wars, and her trade in domestic securities destroyed by the demise of Dutch manufacturing and Dutch shipping, with the enormous international banking business made impossible by the unsettled conditions of the revolutionary wars, the bank could only be maintained by very doubtful financial expedients. And when this pillar of Dutch society began to tremble upon its foundations, which were no longer sound, what was to become of the Dutch banks?
Failures of large commercial houses became disastrously frequent. Each failure in turn affected larger circles of business institutions. Even the expedient of using some of the ancestral capital became difficult where there was no market for the securities which the people wished to sell. Dividends upon foreign securities were passed year after year; taxes went up higher every six months. Such a long siege upon its prosperity no country could stand. And while the people were thus being impoverished, what did the government and what did the French allies do to bring about some improvement? France did nothing at all. The Dutch Government sometimes sent a mild protest to London and asked the British Government not to confiscate ships under a neutral flag, protestations which of course remained unanswered.
Batavia—The fashionable quarter