Passenger fares on trains are cheaper in Holland than with us. But of course their railroad business is really like an interurban street-car system. Freight rates are higher than with us. The wages paid railway employés run from 60 cents a day to section hands up to $2 a day for an engineer—just about one-third to one-half our schedule. The service is good, the stations and tracks are better, every little country road-crossing is protected by a flagman or a flagwoman. Of course the canals and rivers do so much of the carrying business, and distances are so small, that comparisons are hard to make. There is no such thing in Holland as a sandwich or a piece of pie, and yet there are very successful and excellent lunch-rooms in every station. The first-and second-class passengers usually have a lunch-room with upholstered furniture, while the third-class travelers are compelled to use wooden benches or stand up, a la Americaner. The first-class railroad cars are fitted out with plush, and there are sometimes toilet accommodations on the cars. The second-class cars are comfortably upholstered; the third-class have plain seats like our street cars. But remember you can go clear across Holland in a couple of hours, and do not need some of the comforts which are considered necessities in America.
The Dutch are great on fixing things comfortably and neatly. If the beautiful Cow Creek which winds its way through Hutchinson were transferred to a Dutch town it would be diked, the banks graded and covered with grass and flowers and trees. The government would do this, and would put seats along the little park, and a band-stand from which music would be heard, and swings for the children, and almost every block there would be a “garden” with tables and all the beer you could drink—if you were Dutch—for two cents. And the Government would make a nice profit out of the restaurant business and go ahead and dike another stream.
The Dutchman is a great business man. He works and saves and then he is not afraid to spend—if he has a sure thing. I have seen a business man smoking a cigarette, take out of his vest pocket a pair of scissors, snip off the burning end and put the unconsumed half of a cigarette back in his case. No Dutchman is afraid to demand cheap prices while traveling at home. The average American who goes through Europe with the theory of spending his money like a sport must fill the Dutchman with disgust. You don’t impress the Hollanders that way. On the other hand, these Dutchmen will investigate and spend barrels of money on dikes, drains, railroads, buildings and large investments in all parts of the world. I suppose the almost penurious saving comes from the fight with the sea, in which everything had to be watched and worked for, while the ability to handle big affairs results from the consciousness of having wrested a lot of land from the ocean and having made good with it.
The Dutch are proverbially honest. Of course I have been over-charged some, but I have never been anywhere on either side of the Atlantic where the rule was not observed, “he was a stranger and I took him in.” They hold a visitor up much more in Kansas City than in Amsterdam, and a man from Kansas who goes to New York is not even given the protection of the game laws. In fact, a stranger who does not know the language is treated much better in Europe than in America. I have often had a man walk half a block to show me the way when I could not understand his words. I say “walk a block,” but there is no such phrase in Dutch. There are no regular sized blocks, so a direction is given as “five minutes” or “two minutes, then to the right three minutes.” That is supposed to mean an average walk; but as legs differ in size and rapidity it is often confusing. I am told in the rural districts a distance is given as so many smokes, meaning the number of pipefuls of tobacco that a Dutchman would consume in going that far. But I have discovered that in Holland a pipe is a rarity. The men smoke cigars and smoke them incessantly. They are cheap. I get a good cigar, equivalent to a Tom Moore, for two cents American money. When I buy cigars I want to stay in Holland. But practically everything except cigars, beer and wooden shoes costs as much here as in the United States. Yes, there is one thing that costs less, and that is labor. Therefore hand-carved wood, hand-crocheted lace, hand-made shoes, tailored clothes, and houses are less expensive than with us. The more I see of a country where everything labor produces is cheap, the more I am in favor of high prices and good wages. Holland is probably the best country in Europe for a laboring man, but I don’t see how one can get ahead, unless he does without meat and wears the same suit for years, and his family economize the same way. Here in the land of cheese and butter, both articles are out of reach and the workingman uses “margarine.”
But now it is goodby to the land of the dikes, the canals, the windmills and the wooden shoes. They are all here as advertised, and they color the lives of the people as they do the landscape of the country. To the eye they are artistic and beautiful, but in practice they are common, plain necessities, and in these signs the Dutch have conquered.