Incidentally I want to report that the people of Europe are looking on President Taft as the great man of the age—I mean the great common people are. His successful advocacy of international arbitration is hailed as the coming of an era of peace. You don’t know what that means to Europe, where nearly every man has to give years of his life to army service, where heavy taxes for forts and ships bear down on the people, and where there is always a possibility of war with a neighboring nation, which would mean great loss of life. Nearly all of this war sacrifice falls upon the people, and while they patriotically sustain their governments they hail Taft’s policy of peace as the greatest help that has come to them in countless years, the advance step that will relieve the burden that bends the back of what Mr. Bryan calls “the plain common people.” No wonder these people are for Taft but of course they can’t vote for him in 1912.
The government of Holland is a sort of aristocratic republic with a monarch for ornament. There is a lower house of congress elected by popular vote, with some restrictions as to property on the right of suffrage. There is an upper house selected with still more restrictions. The upper house only can introduce bills. The lower house only can enact them into laws. The queen signs when the Dutch congress, or states-general, tells her to sign. She gets a salary of about $400,000 a year and is rich in her own right. The business men complain that she is stingy and the women say she is slouchy. Taxes are high, and in all the forms imaginable. They tax theatre tickets, bank checks, receipts, all documents, incomes and lands, and in some places the number of windows in a house. Taxes are “high” everywhere I go. I thought perhaps when I got where I could not understand the language I would no longer be bored by the man who complains about taxes. But I have not yet found that place. I suppose when I quit traveling on this earthly sphere the first thing I will hear will be a kick on the cost of paving the golden streets, or a complaint that the tax on sulphur is going to kill the prosperity of the country.
“The Dutch Company.”
Arnhem, August 5th.
This is the “last chance” station in Holland. About ten miles more and we cross the line into Germany. This is also the only hilly part of Holland, and it really is a surprise to find that somewhere in this little country there are neither canals nor dikes. The river Rhine flows here with some current, and the official documents say that at Arnhem it is 35 feet above the level of the sea. Right sharp little hills, as big as those about Strong City, rise from the river bank, and are covered with woods and handsome homes. Queen Wilhelmina has her summer residence near here, and Dutch colonials, who have made their fortunes and returned to the native land, are fond of this small and elevated piece of Netherland. The Dutch make a great deal of money out of their East India colonies, one of which is Java. They are not so much interested in preparing the Javanese or the Mochans for the work of self-government as our folks are the Filipinos. The Dutch theory is to treat the natives kindly but make them work as the dogs do in Holland. And the Javanese or the Javans, or whatever you call them, are too busy to get dissatisfied and plan revolutions. This question of what to do with the white man’s burden is a hard one to settle offhand. The brown people do not understand the American motives, and the Americans are probably the most detested people in the Orient. And yet the Americans are the only conquering nation which does not regard colonies as personal property and which tries to elevate the citizenship it finds. The English hold India by fear, but some day the English are going to be chased out of that part of Asia by the Indians they try to keep down. The other European nations make no bones of the fact that they own and operate their foreign possessions for what they can get out of them.
A Hollander makes a very strong American when he is caught young. On shipboard I made the acquaintance of a young man about 25 years old who had been in America nine years, and was now going to his birthplace, The Hague, on business for the Chicago firm with which he is connected. I met him in The Hague this week. He wore a western cowboy hat, had a small American flag in his button-hole, and wore no vest. The stories he was telling about the United States to his Dutch friends showed that he would have made a success as a real-estate man if he had settled in western Kansas. And the manner in which he did not take off his hat when he met a doctor or a lawyer or a duke or a notary public was shocking to his family, but was sweet American patriotism to him. He was still loyal to Holland, but he would not trade his new home with its opportunities for all the comforts of canals and clean streets. “You see,” he said, “in Holland every man has to take off his hat to those above him—and there are always those above him.” Of course we have classes, in a way, in our country, but a man never has to take off his hat or pay homage to another man, and the real American, home-grown or imported, can’t get that feeling of equality out of his system. I think the Europeans must grow very tired of us Americans, our blustering ways and bragging talk, but they are kind enough not to mention it so long as our money holds out.