THE DUTCH AND THEIR COUNTRY.
The enemies with which they had to contend were three—the sea, the lakes, the rivers. They dried up the lakes, imprisoned the rivers, drove back the sea.
In order to drain the lakes they made use of the air. The lakes and ponds were surrounded by dams, the dams by canals. An army of windmills put pumps in motion, which turned the water into the canals, which conducted it to the rivers and to the sea. Thus vast spaces of land buried under water were transformed as if by enchantment into fertile, smiling plains, populated by villages. From 1500 to 1858 the amount of land reclaimed was 355 miles.
By the substitution of steam instead of windmills, the great lake of Haarlem was dried, the furious tempests of which threatened the cities of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leyden with destruction; and the Dutch, in 1883, seriously contemplated the prodigious undertaking of reclaiming the land buried under the Zuyder Zee.
The rivers did not cost much less labour than the lakes, but the most tremendous struggle was with the ocean. A great part of Holland is below sea-level, and the land has to be defended by dykes. If these wonderful bulwarks of earth and of wood and granite were not there as monuments to attest the courage and perseverance of the Dutch, no one would believe that the hand of man, even in the course of centuries, could accomplish so great a work.
Holland is an impregnable fortress. The mills are the towers of its immense bastions, the cataracts the gates, the islands the advanced forts; and she shows to her enemy, the sea, only the belfries and roofs of the edifices.
Holland is a fortress, and the Dutch, like people in a fortress, stand on a perpetual war-footing with the sea. An army of engineers, dependent on the Minister of the Interior, spy upon the enemy continually, watch over the state of the internal waters, provide for ruptures in the embankments, advise and direct new works of defence to strengthen and support the old.
The danger is constant, the sentinels ever at their posts. At the first assault of the sea they give the cry of alarm, and Holland sends arms, materials, and money. Even when there is not a great battle raging, there is always a slow, silent struggle. The innumerable mills are never quiet, always pumping the rain-water into the canals. Every day the cataracts of the canals and rivers shut their huge gates against the rising tide, which struggles to precipitate itself into the heart of the country.
But Holland has done more than defend herself from the sea, and master it. The waters were her scourge, but she has made them her defence. When a foreign army invaded her territory, she opened her sluice-gates, unchained the sea and the waves, and let them loose on the enemy, defending internal cities with a fleet. The water was her poverty; she made it her wealth.