We spent part of a day in Haarlem, where the tulips come from. The soil conditions are like those at Alkmaar, but the country is a mass of nurseries, flower gardens, and beautiful growing plants. We are out of season for tulips, but this is the time when the bulbs are being collected and dried to be shipped in all directions. Not only tulips but crocuses, hyacinths, lilies, anemones, etc., are raised for the market,—cut flowers to the cities, bulbs to all parts of the world. Just now the gardens are filled with phlox, dahlias, larkspurs, nasturtiums,—by the acre. The flowers are about the same as at home. Out of this thin, scraggly, sandy soil the gardeners of North Holland are taking money for flowers and bulbs faster than miners in gold-fields. With flowers and cheeses these Dutch catch about all kinds of people.
Haarlem is the capital of the province of North Holland, and is full of quaint houses of ancient architecture. It was one of the hot towns for independence when the war with Spain began. The Spaniards besieged it, and after a seven months gallant defense, in which even the women fought as soldiers, the town surrendered under promise of clemency. The Spaniards broke their promise and put to death the entire garrison and nearly all the townspeople. This outrage so incensed the Dutch in other places that the war was fought more bitterly than before, and the crime—for such it was—really aided in the final expulsion of the Spaniards.
Along in the seventeenth century was the big boom in Haarlem. The tulip mania developed and bulbs sold for thousands of dollars. Capitalists engaged in the speculation and the trade went into big figures. Millions of dollars were spent for the bulbs, and so long as the demand and the market continued every tulip-raiser was rich. Finally the reaction came, as it always does to a boom, and everybody went broke. A bulb which sold for $5,000 one year was not worth 50 cents the next. The government added to the confusion by decreeing that all contracts for future deliveries were illegal. The usual phenomenon of a panic followed, everybody losing and nobody gaining. A hundred years later there was about the same kind of a boom in hyacinths, and the same result. It will be observed that the Dutch are not so much unlike Americans when it comes to booms, only it takes longer for them to forget and calls for more experience.
Frans Hals, a great Dutch painter, almost next to Rembrandt, was born in Haarlem, and a number of his pictures are in the city building. It was customary in those days for the mayor and city council to have a group picture painted and hung in the town hall. This was the way most of the Dutch artists got their start, for the officials were always wealthy citizens who were willing to pay more for their own pictures than for studies of nature or allegory. I wonder if the officials paid their own money or did they voucher it through the city treasury and charge it to sprinkling or street work?
Both Alkmaar and Haarlem are interesting because they are intensely Dutch. Their principal occupations, cheesemaking and flower-raising, have been their principal occupations for centuries. They had nothing to start with and had to fight for that. Now they are loaning money to the world. If the people of Kansas worked as hard as do the Dutch and were as economical and saving, in one generation they would have all the money in the world. But they wouldn’t have much fun.