One of the worst military mistakes of Spain was the creation of great galleons in preference to small cruisers. The sight of the big ships terrorised the Dutch once, in 1606; but as all existing seacraft had been built up in small vessels, there was no sufficient science for the navigation of the great ones in stress of weather, or even for the building of them on sound lines. The English and Dutch, on the other hand, fought in vessels of the kind they had always been wont to handle, increasing their size only by slow degrees. In the reign of Henry VIII, again, nothing came of the English expeditions of discovery fitted out by him (Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, i, 321), but private voyages were successfully made by traders (id. pp. 321, 327).
In the seventeenth century, however, and until far on in the eighteenth, all Dutch shipping was more economically managed than the English. In all likelihood the Dutch traders knew and improved upon the systematic control of ship-construction which the Venetians and Genoese had first copied from the Byzantines, and in turn developed. (Above, p. 197.) Raleigh was one of the first to point out that the broad Dutch boats carried more cargo with fewer hands than those of any other nation (Observations touching Trade, in Works, ed. 1829, viii, 356). Later in the century Petty noted that the Dutch practised freight-economies and adaptations of every kind, having different sorts of vessels for different kinds of traffic (Essays in Political Arithmetic [1690], ed. 1699, pp. 179, 180, 182, 183). This again gave them the primacy in shipbuilding for the whole of Europe (Mémoires de Jean De Witt, ptie. i, ch. vi), though they imported all the materials for the purpose. When Colbert began navy-building, his first care was to bring in Dutch shipwrights (Dussieux, Étude biographique sur Colbert, 1886, p. 101). Compare, as to the quick sailing of the Dutch, Motley, United Netherlands, ed. 1867, iv, 556. In the next century the English marine had similar economic advantages over the French, which was burdened by royal schemes for multiplying seamen (see Tucker, Essay on Trade, 4th ed. p. 37).
The frugality which pervaded the whole of Dutch life may, however, have had one directly disastrous effect. Sir William Temple noted that the common people were poorly fed (Observations upon the United Provinces, ch. iv: Works, ed. 1814, i, 133, 147); and though their fighting ships were manned by men of all nations, the tendency was to feed them in the native fashion. Such a practice would tell fatally in the sea-fights with the English. Cp. Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 123.
In addition to this expertness in handling, the Dutch traders seem to have bettered the lesson taught them by the practice of the Hansa, as to the importance of keeping up a high character for probity. At a time when British goods were open to more or less general suspicion as being of short measure or bad quality,[808] the Dutch practice was to insure by inspection the right quality and quantity of all packed goods, especially the salted herrings, which were still the largest source of Dutch income.[809] And that nothing might be left undone to secure the concourse of commerce to their ports, they maintained under almost every stress[810] of financial hardship the principle of minimum duties on imports of every description. The one notable exception to this policy of practically free trade—apart from the monopoly of the trade in the Indies—was the quite supererogatory veto on the importation of fish from other countries at a time when most of the fishing of Northern Europe was in Dutch hands.[811] Where imports were desirable they were encouraged. Thus it came about that landless Amsterdam was the chief European storehouse for grain, and treeless Holland the greatest centre of the timber trade. Before such a spectacle the average man held up his hands and confessed the incomparable ingenuity of the Hollanders. But others saw and stated the causation clearly enough. "Many writing on this subject," remarks Sir William Petty, "do magnifie the Hollanders as if they were more, and all other nations less, than men, as to the matters of trade and policy; making them angels, and all others fools, brutes, and sots, as to those particulars; whereas," he continues, giving a sound lesson in social science to his generation, "I take the foundation of their achievements to be originally in the situation of the country, whereby they do things inimitable by others, and have advantages whereof others are incapable."[812] And Sir Josiah Child, of the same generation, declared similarly against transcendentalism in such matters. "If any," he roundly declares, "shall tell me it is the nature of those people to be thrifty, I answer, all men by nature are alike; it is only laws, custom, and education that differ men; their nature and disposition, and the disposition of all people in the world, proceed from their laws."[813] For "laws" read "circumstances and institutions," adding reservations as to climate and temperament and variation of individual capacity and bias, and the proposition is the essence of all sociology. Economic lessons which Petty and Child could not master have since been learned; but their higher wisdom has hardly yet been assimilated.
The sufficient proof that Holland had no abnormal enlightenment even in commerce was that, like her rivals, she continued to maintain the system of monopoly companies. Her "empire" in the East, to which was falsely ascribed so much of her wealth, in reality stood for very little sound commerce. The East India Company being conducted on high monopoly lines, the profits were made rather through the smallness than the greatness of the trade done. Thus, while the Company paid enormous dividends,[814] the imports of spice were kept at a minimum, in order to maintain the price, large quantities being actually destroyed for the purpose. For a time they contrived to raise pepper to double the old Portuguese price.[815] Such methods brought it about that when the republic had in all 10,000 sail, the East India trade employed only ten or twelve ships.[816] All the while the small class of capitalists who owned the shares were able to satisfy the people that the merely monetary and factitious riches thus secured to the Company's shareholders was a form of public wealth.[817]
It is a complete error to say, as did Professor Seeley (Expansion of England, p. 112), that Holland "made her fortune in the world" because the war with Spain "threw open to her attack the whole boundless possessions of her antagonist in the New World, which would have been closed to her in peace. By conquest she made for herself an empire, and this empire made her rich." In the first place it was not in the New World that she mainly sought her empire, but in the East Indies, in the sphere of the Portuguese conquests. Her hold of Brazil lasted only from 1621 to 1654, and was not a great source of wealth, though she captured much Spanish and Portuguese shipping. But even her eastern trade was, as we have seen, small in quantity, and as a source of wealth was not to be compared with the herring fishery. In 1601 John Keymor declared that more wealth was produced by the northern fisheries "in one year than the King of Spain hath in four years out of the Indies" (Observations made upon the Dutch Fishing about the Year 1601—reprint in Phœnix, 1707, i, 225). The Dutch takings in six months' fishing were then reckoned at 3,600,000 barrels, valued at as many pounds sterling (id. p. 224); the fishing fleet numbered 4,100 sail of all kinds, with over 3,000 tenders, out of a roughly estimated total of 20,000; while the whole Indian fleet is stated at only 40 or 50, employing 5,000 or 6,000 men (id. p. 223), as against a total of some 200,000 of Dutch seafaring population. Howell, writing in 1622 (ed. Bennett, 1891, vol. i, 205), also puts the Amsterdam ships in the Indian trade at 40. Professor Seeley's statement cannot have proceeded on any comparison of the European Dutch trade with the revenue from the conquered "empire." It stands for an endorsement of the vulgar delusion that "possessions" are the great sources of a nation's wealth, though Seeley elsewhere (p. 294) protests against the "bombastic language of this school," and notes that "England is not, directly at least, any the richer" for her connection with her "dependencies."
Against the class-interest behind the East India Company the republican party, as led and represented by De Witt, were strongly arrayed. They could point to the expansion of the Greenland whaling trade that had followed on the abolition of the original monopoly in that adventure—an increase of from ten to fifteen times the old quantity of product[818]—and the treatise expounding their policy strongly condemned the remaining monopolies of all kinds. But there was no sufficient body of enlightened public opinion to support the attack; and the menaced interests spontaneously turned to the factor which could best maintain them against such pressure—the military power of the House of Orange. The capitalist monopolists and "imperialists" of the republic were thus the means first of artificially limiting its economic basis, and later of subverting its republican constitution—a disservice which somewhat outweighs the credit earned by them, as by the merchant oligarchies of Venice, for an admirable management of their army.[819]
The vital part played by William the Silent at the outset of the war of independence gave his house a decisive predominance in the affairs of the republic, grudging as had often been its support of him during life. As always, the state of war favoured the rule of the imperator, once the institution had been established. Fanatical clergy and populace alike were always loud in support of the lineage of the Deliverer; and with their help William's son Maurice was able to put to death Barneveldt. Then and afterwards, accordingly, war was more or less the Orange interest; and after the Peace of Münster we find the republican party sedulous at once to keep the peace and to limit the power of the hereditary stadthouder. The latter, William II, aged twenty-four, having on his side the great capitalists, tried force in a fashion which promised desperate trouble,[820] but died at the crisis (1650), his only child being born a week after his death.
It was substantially the pressure of the Orange interest, thus situated, that led to the first naval war between Holland and England, both then republics, and both Protestant. Orangeist mobs, zealous for Charles I, as the father of the Princess of Orange, insulted the English republican ambassadors who had come to negotiate on Cromwell's impossible scheme for a union of the two republics; and the prompt result was the Navigation Act, intended[821] to hurt Dutch commerce. It was really powerless for that purpose; but the Dutch people in general believed otherwise, and, being not only independent but bellicose, they were as ready as Puritan England for a struggle at sea. While, however, they held their ground in the main as fighters, they suffered heavily in their trade. By 1653 they had lost over sixteen hundred ships through English privateering; so that the two years of the English war had done them more injury than the eighty years of the Spanish.[822] Accordingly, though forced again to war by Charles II, the republican party put it as a maxim of policy that Dutch prosperity depended on peace.[823] It is nevertheless one of the tragedies of their history that John de Witt, the great statesman who owed most heed to this maxim, was inveigled by the English Government into an ill-judged alliance against France,[824] and was then deserted by England, whereupon the republic was invaded by France, and De Witt was murdered by his own people. Of all the nations of Europe the Dutch were then the best educated; but no more than ancient Athens had their republic contrived to educate its mob. The result was a frightful moral catastrophe.