To King William, however, who had devoted his time and strength quite as much to Belgium as to Holland, the separation came as a terrible blow. William was one of those sovereigns who take a cup of coffee and a bun at five in the morning and then set to work to do everything for everybody. He could not understand that mere devotion to duty was not sufficient to make all his subjects love him. Perhaps he had not always shown great tact in dealing with religious matters. But, then, look at his material results. The Prince, who seventeen years before had been hailed as the saviour of his country, now began to suffer under the undeserved slights of his discontented citizens and was made a subject for attacks which were wholly unwarranted. That the conditions in the kingdom were in many ways quite unsatisfactory, is true; but it was not so entirely the fault of the king as his contemporaries were so eager to believe. They themselves had at first given him too much power. They had without examination accepted a constitution which allowed their parliament no control over monetary matters. The result of this state of affairs had been a wholesale system of thefts and graft. The king knew nothing of this, could not have known it. There were private individuals who thought that they could prove it, but the ministers of state were not responsible to the parliament, and there was no legitimate way of bringing these unsound conditions to the attention of the sovereign.
And so the discontented elements started upon a campaign of calumny and of silent disapproval, until finally William, who strongly felt that he had done his duty to the best of his ability, became so thoroughly disgusted with the ingratitude of his subjects that he resigned in favour of his son, who, as William II, came to the throne in 1840. William then left the country and never returned.
King William II
What must we say of William II? We are not trying to write a detailed history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This little book merely tries to fill out the mysterious and unexplored space between the end of the old Dutch Republic and the modern kingdom. Even these twenty years it does not try to describe too minutely, because on the whole (except for the people themselves) the period was so absolutely uninteresting to the outside world that we would not be warranted in asking the attention of the intelligent reader for more than a limited number of pages. William II was a good king in that he was a constitutional king. The year 1848 did not see the erection of barricades in the quiet Dutch cities. If the people, or, rather, the few liberals who had begun to develop out of the mass of indifferent material—if these gentlemen wanted another and a more liberal constitution very badly, they could have it as far as William II was concerned. And without revolution or undue noise the absolute kingdom which the men of 1813 had constructed to keep the men of 1795 in check was quietly changed into an absolutely constitutional monarchy after the British pattern, with responsible ministers and a parliament ruled by the different political parties. The budget now became a public institution, openly discussed every year by the whole people through their chosen representatives and their newspapers.
The king in this way became the hereditary president of a constitutional republic. There can be no doubt that the system was personally disagreeable to William II as well as to his son William III, who succeeded him in 1849. But neither of them for a moment thought of deviating from the narrow road which alone guaranteed safety to themselves and to their subjects. However much they may have liked or disliked certain individuals who as the result of a change in party had to be appointed to be ministers of the government, they never allowed their own personal feelings to interfere with the provisions of the constitution to which at their ascension to the throne they had sworn allegiance. This policy they continued with such excellent success that whatever strength the socialistic party or the other parties of economic discontent may at present be able to develop, those who would actually like to see the monarchy changed into a republic are so very rare and form such an insignificant part of the total population that a continuation of the present system seems assured for an indefinite length of time, which is saying a great deal in our day of democratic unrest.
As we write these final words a hundred years have gone by since the days of the French domination and of the many revolutionary upheavals; the nation of the year 1813, broken down under the hopeless feeling of failure, and the people, despairing of the future and indifferent to everything of the present which did not touch their bread and butter, have disappeared. One after the other they travelled the road to those open air cemeteries which they had so much detested as a revolutionary innovation, their ancestors all slept under their own church-pews, and their place was taken by younger blood.
But it was not until the year 1870 that we could notice a more hopeful attitude in the point of view of the Dutch nation. Then, at last, it recovered from the blows of the first twelve years of the century. Then it regained the courage of its own individual convictions and once more was ready to take up the burden of nationality. Once more the low countries aspired to that place among the nations to which their favourable geographical position, the thrift of their population, and the enterprise of their leading merchants so fully entitled them. The revival, when it came, was along all lines. Scholarship in many branches of learning compared very favourably with the best days of the old republic. The arts revived and brought back glimpses of the seventeenth century. Social legislation gave the country an honourable place among those states which earnestly endeavour to mitigate the disadvantages of our present capitalistic development and by direct interference of the legislature aim for a higher type of society in which the many shall not spend their lives in a daily drudgery for the benefit of the few.
The feeling that colonies were merely an agreeable asset to the merchants of the country and called for no special obligations upon their part gradually gave way to the modern view that the colonies are a trust which for many a year to come must stay in the hands of European men before they shall be able to render them to the natives for a rule of their own people. Finally that most awful and most despondent of all sentimental meditations, that "we have been a great country once," that "we have had our time," has begun to make place for the conviction that at this very moment no other nation of such a small area and insignificant number of people is capable of performing such valuable service in so many fields of human endeavour as is the modern Dutch nation.