The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

As to the vice of the Dutch constitution, the principle of the supremacy of "State rights," see M'Cullagh, p. 215; Motley, Rise, pp. 794, 795 (Pt. vi, ch. ii, end), and United Netherlands, ed. 1867, iv, 564. Wicquefort (L'histoire des Provinces-Unies, La Haye, 1719, pp. 5, 16), following Grotius, laid stress long ago on the fact that the Estates of each province recognised no superior, not even the entire body of the Republic. It was only the measure of central government set up in the Burgundo-Austrian and Spanish periods that made the Seven Provinces capable of enough united action to repel Spanish rule during a chronic struggle of eighty years. Cp. Van Kampen (i, 304), who points out (p. 306) that the word "State" first appears in Holland in the fifteenth century. It arose in Flanders in the thirteenth, and in Brabant in the fourteenth. Only in 1581, after some years of war, did the United Provinces set up a General Executive Council. In the same year the Prince of Orange was chosen sovereign (Motley, pp. 838, 841).

§ 3. The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce

The conquest of Flanders by Alexander of Parma, reducing its plains to wolf-haunted wildernesses, and driving the great mass of the remaining artisans from its ruined towns,[783] helped to consummate the prosperity of the United Provinces, who took over the industry of Ghent with the commerce of Antwerp.[784] Getting the start of all northern Europe in trade, they had become at the date of their assured independence the chief trading State in the world. Whatever commercial common sense the world had yet acquired was there in force. And inasmuch as the wealth and strength of these almost landless States, with their mostly poor soil and unavoidably heavy imposts, depended so visibly on quantity of trade turnover, they not only continued to offer a special welcome to all immigrants, but gradually learned to forego the congenial Protestant strife of sects. It was indeed a reluctantly-learned lesson. Even as local patriotisms constantly tended to hamper unity during the very period of struggle, so the primary spirit of self-assertion set the ruling Calvinistic party upon persecuting not only Catholics and Lutherans, but the new heresy of Arminianism:[785] so little does "patriotic" warfare make for fraternity in peace. The judicial murder of the statesman John van Olden Barneveldt (1619) at the hands of Maurice of Orange, whom he had guarded in childhood and trained to statesmanship, was accomplished as a sequel to the formal proscription of the Arminian heresy in the Synod of Dort; and Barneveldt was formally condemned for "troubling God's Church" as well as on the charge of treason.[786] On the same pretexts Grotius was thrown into prison; and the freedom of the press was suspended.[787] It was doubtless the shame of the memory of the execution of Barneveldt (the true founder of the Republic as such),[788] on an absolutely false charge of treason, and the observation of how, as elsewhere, persecution drove away population, that mainly wrought for the erection of tolerance (at least as between Protestant sects) into a State principle.

The best side of the Dutch polity was its finance, which was a lesson to all Europe. Already in the early stages of the struggle with Spain, the States were able on credit to make war, in virtue of their character for commercial honour. Where the king of Spain, with all his revenues mortgaged past hope,[789] got from the Pope an absolution from the payment of interest on the sums borrowed from Spanish and Genoese merchants, and so ruined his credit,[790] the Dutch issued tin money and paper money, and found it readily pass current with friends and foes.[791]

Of all the Protestant countries, excepting Switzerland, the Dutch States alone disposed of their confiscated church lands in the public interest.[792] There was indeed comparatively little to sell,[793] and the money was sorely needed to carry on the war; but the transaction seems to have been carried through without any corruption. It was the suggestion of what might be accomplished in statecraft by the new expertise of trade, forced into the paths of public spirit and checked by a stress of public opinion such as had never come into play in Venice. Against such a power as Spain, energy ruled by unteachable unintelligence, a world-empire financed by the expedients of provincial feudalism, the Dutch needed only an enduring resentment to sustain them, and this Philip amply elicited. Had he spent on light cruisers for the destruction of Dutch commerce the treasure he wasted on the Armadas against England and on his enormous operations by land, typified in the monstrous siege of Antwerp, he might have struck swiftly and surely at the very arteries of Dutch life; but in yielding to them the command of their primary source and channel of wealth, the sea, he insured their ultimate success. In the Franco-Spanish war of 1521-25 the French cruisers nearly ruined the herring fishery of Holland and Zealand;[794] and it was doubtless the memory of that plight that set the States on maintaining predominant power at sea.[795]

Throughout the war, which from first to last spread over eighty years, the Dutch commerce grew while that of Spain dwindled. Under Charles V, Flanders and Brabant alone had paid nearly two-thirds of the whole imperial taxation of the Netherlands;[796] but after a generation or two the United Provinces must have been on an equality of financial resources with those left under Spanish rule, even in a state of peace. Yet in this posture of things there had grown up a burden which represented, in the warring commercial State, the persistent principle of class parasitism; for at the Peace of Münster (1648) the funded public debt of the province of Holland alone amounted to nearly 150,000,000 florins, bearing interest at five per cent.[797] Of this annual charge, the bulk must have gone into the pockets of the wealthier citizens, who had thus secured a mortgage on the entire industry of the nation. All the while, Holland was nominally rich in "possessions" beyond sea. When, in 1580, Philip annexed Portugal, with which the Dutch had hitherto carried on a profitable trade for the eastern products brought as tribute to Lisbon, they began to cast about for an Asiatic trade of their own, first seeking vainly for a north-east passage. The need was heightened when in 1586 Philip, who as a rule ignored the presence of Dutch traders in his ports under friendly flags, arrested all the Dutch shipping he could lay hands on;[798] and when in 1594 he closed to them the port of Lisbon, he forced them to a course which his successors bitterly rued. In 1595 they commenced trading by the Cape passage to the Indies, and a fleet sent out by Spain to put down their enterprise was as usual defeated.[799] Then arose a multitude of companies for the East Indian trade, which in 1602 were formed by the government into a great semi-official joint-stock concern, at once commercial and military, reminiscent of the Hanseatic League. The result was a long series of settlements and conquests. Amboyna and the Moluccas were seized from the Portuguese, now subordinate to Spain; Java, where a factory was founded in 1597, was in the next generation annexed; Henry Hudson, an English pilot in the Dutch Company's service, discovered the Hudson River and Bay in 1609, and founded New Amsterdam about 1624. In 1621 was formed the Dutch West India Company, which in fifteen years fitted out 800 ships of trade and war, captured 545 from the Spanish and Portuguese, with cargoes valued at 90,000,000 florins, and conquered the greater part of what had been the Portuguese empire in Brazil.

No such commercial development had before been seen in Europe. About 1560, according to Guicciardini,[800] 500 ships had been known to come and go in a day from Antwerp harbour in the island of Walcheren; but in the spring of 1599, it is recorded, 640 ships engaged solely in the Baltic trade discharged cargoes at Amsterdam;[801] and in 1610, according to Delacourt, there sailed from the ports of Holland in three days, on the eastward trade alone, 800 or 900 ships and 1,500 herring boats.[802] At the date of the Peace of Münster these figures were left far behind, whence had arisen a reluctance to end the war, under which commerce so notably flourished. Many Hollanders, further, had been averse to peace in the belief that it would restore Antwerp and injure their commerce, even as Prince Maurice of Orange, the republic's general and stadthouder, had been averse to it as likely to lessen his power and revenue.[803] But between 1648 and 1669 the trade increased by fifty per cent.,[804] Holland taking most of the Spanish trade from the shipping of England and the Hansa, and even carrying much of the trade between Spain and her colonies. When the Dutch had thus a mercantile marine of 10,000 sail and 168,000 men, the English carried only 27,196 men; and the Dutch shipping was probably greater than that of all the rest of Europe together.[805]

This body of trade, as has been seen, was built up by a State which, broadly speaking, had a surplus wealth-producing power in only one direction, that of fishing; and even of its fishing, much was done on the coasts of other nations. In that industry, about 1610, it employed over 200,000 men; and the Greenland whale fishery, which was a monopoly from 1614 to 1645, began to expand rapidly when set free,[806] till in 1670 it employed 120 ships.[807] For the rest, though the country exported dairy produce, its total food product was not equal to its consumption; and as it had no minerals and no vineyards, its surplus wealth came from the four sources of fishing, freightage, extorted colonial produce, and profits on the handling of goods bought and sold. Par excellence, it was, in the phrase of Louis XIV, the nation of shopkeepers, of middlemen; and its long supremacy in the business of buying cheap and selling dear was due firstly to economy of means and consumption, and secondarily to command of accumulated money capital at low rates of interest. The sinking of interest was the first sign that the limits to its commercial expansion were being reached; but it belonged to the conditions that, with or without "empire," its advantage must begin to fall away as soon as rival States were able to compete with it in the economies of "production" in the sense of transport and transfer.

In such economies the Dutch superiority grew out of the specially practical basis of their marine—habitual fishing and the constant use of canals. There is no better way than the former of building up seamanship; and just as the Portuguese grew from hardy fishers to daring navigators, so the Dutch grew from thrifty fishers and bargemen to thrifty handlers of sea-freight, surpassing in economy the shippers of England as they did in seamanship the marine of Spain. Broadly speaking, the navies which owed most to royal fostering—as those of Spain, France, and in part England—were the later to reach efficiency in the degree of their artificiality; and the loss of one great Spanish navy after another in storms must be held to imply a lack of due experience on the part of their officers.