IN DUTCH LAND.
Amsterdam, Holland, July 31, 1905.
The kingdom of Holland is a little bit of a country, but it has exerted a great influence in history. In size it is 12,650 square miles, not as large as the Seventh congressional district of Kansas, but it has over 5,000,000 inhabitants and is busy from one end to the other. The greater part lies below the level of the sea, which borders it on the west and has been literally reclaimed from the water by the energy and work of the people. The Hollanders are the Dutch, and they have a saying: “God made the sea, but we made the land.” The water is held back by immense dikes, and here in Amsterdam I look toward the sea and the great lot of shipping along the quay is higher than the tops of many of the houses; that is, the water is higher than the roofs in the town. The industry which has thus driven back and held back the sea has made little Holland a wealthy nation and Dutch capital has not only built up business at home, but it has gone into the farthermost parts of the earth, even to Missouri and Arkansas, constructed railroads, started factories and earned dividends or gone into the hands of receivers in large amounts. The country is covered with canals about as Kansas is with section-line roads. These canals are used for commerce, carrying freight cheaply, and for drainage, irrigation, and in place of fences. Every farm has its little canal leading to a main canal as a farmer’s road in Kansas goes out to the main traveled road. The farmer brings his stuff to town in a canal-boat, and a farm-wagon is almost as rare a sight in Holland as a canal-boat is in Kansas. In wet seasons the canals are used as drains and in dry seasons as irrigating-ditches. Canals are built above the level of the land, so that irrigation is easy, and for drainage the water is collected in ditches and pumped up into the canals. All of these facts I had read about, as has everyone else, but to actually see such a country was like a dream come true.
There is more sky in Holland than anywhere else. The land is flatter than a Kansas prairie. The scenery would be absolutely nothing if it were not for the works of man upon the surface. There are no hills in Holland, no rushing streams, no picturesque bits of nature. Some of the land looks lower than the rest, but none looks higher, and the water from the big rivers that enter Holland on the east simply oozes through the soil and canals, without a perceptible current and really without river-beds or water-courses. The Rhine spreads out until it is fifty miles wide, but it is no longer a river,—merely a network of canals which it supplies with water, and its old channels are now made by dikes and drainage into farms and town-sites. The landscape thus becomes a flat, fertile country, mostly farmed in grass and pastured with cattle and sheep, a lace-work of canals in shiny streaks running in every direction, narrow red brick houses with white trimmings, and windmills which tower above everything else and stand like giant sentinels over the low and level country. These windmills are big, fifty to a hundred feet high, the lower part usually used as dwellings, constructed as strongly and stoutly as government buildings, and with four immense arms or sails which convert the Dutch zephyrs into horsepower. The windmills are used for grinding grain, sawing lumber and in all kinds of manufacturing, as well as to pump water from the low ground to the canals and into the sea. A Kansas windmill compared to a Dutch windmill would be like a straw beside an oak tree.
Very often in Europe I have been compelled to draw on my imagination to make the actual facts come within speaking distance of what had been written or promised about a country. Not so in Holland. Everything I have ever read about dikes, canals and windmills is true, and nothing you have been able to imagine is beyond the real existing condition and appearance.
Yes, there is one thing, and I wonder if other people would feel the same way. In the pictures and on the china the windmills, the cows and even the people have always been blue. Of course I knew better, but when I found that a Holland landscape was not blue and white, I felt as if I had been deceived. The sky is blue, but the windmills are browned with exposure, the cows are black-and-white, and the people are not any more blue in Holland than they are in Newton.
The ride from Cologne, Germany, to Amsterdam, down the valley of the Rhine, which is no longer picturesque or lined with castles and legends, gave me my introduction to Holland. Most of it is the kind of country in which a traveler can enjoy reading a good book. After the first enthusiastic demonstration over windmills,—and they are more numerous than telegraph posts along the Santa Fe,—and the excitement of watching canal-boats having died out, Holland is not a country that causes thrills. There is a strange effect created on seeing a canal-boat in a canal a little distance off. You see a sailboat or a steamboat apparently sailing right through a pasture. You can’t see the water, and the effect is as if ships were really gliding over the grass and fields.