A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

"A cuspidor shall be kept by the front door of each house.

"It is forbidden to cross the village in a carriage, or to drive animals through the streets."

Thus, it appears that "Spotless Town" is not merely an ideal existing in the imagination of the man who writes the very clever verses placarded in our street-cars and elsewhere in praise of the cleansing properties of Sapolio, but a reality; and there are numerous places in Holland which in point of cleanliness would put to shame any of our American towns.

A Pardonable Mania.

Some one has said that the Dutch love of cleanliness amounts almost to a monomania, and that the washing, scrubbing and polishing to which every house is subjected once every week is rather subversive of comfort. And it would appear from the regulations above cited that the matter is sometimes pushed to extremes. But my experience as a traveller in some parts of my own country, as well as in some parts of other lands, has made me very tolerant of such a mania as that, and, when amid the filth of Venice or Naples, for instance, my mind has reverted to these clean Dutch towns, it has caused me to sigh—"O si sic omnes!"

Mr. Edward Bok on the "Mother of America."

I cannot resist the temptation to append to these letters about little, quaint, clean, energetic, heroic, learned, unpretentious Holland some extracts from an article of Mr. Edward Bok's which I have read since my return to America. He refers to the fact that twenty thousand more American travellers are said to have visited the Netherlands during the past summer than in any previous year, and to the fact that there is a rapidly increasing demand for books on the history of the Dutch people, as shown by the reports of the librarians in American towns, and he regards these as specimens of a group of facts which, taken together, indicate clearly that the reading world of America is beginning to appreciate the real extent of the strong Dutch influences which underlie American institutions and have shaped American life. He says that for years we have written in our histories and taught in our schools that this nation is a transplanted England; that the institutions which have made this country distinctively great were derived from England. But he denies that England is entitled to this honor, and declares that the true mother land of America is not England, but Holland:

"Take, for instance, what may be truly designated as the four vital institutions upon which America not only rests, but which have caused it to be regarded as the most distinctive nation in the world. I mean our public-school system of free education; our freedom of religious worship; our freedom of the press; and our freedom of suffrage as represented by the secret ballot. Not one of these came from England, since not one of them existed there when they were established in America; in fact, only one of them existed in England earlier than fifty years after they existed in America, and the other three did not exist in England until nearly one hundred years after their establishment in America. Each and all of these four institutions came to America directly from Holland. Take the two documents upon which the whole fabric of the establishment and maintenance of America rests—the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution of the United States—and one, the Declaration, is based almost entirely upon the Declaration of Independence of the United Republic of the Netherlands; while all through the Constitution its salient points are based upon, and some literally copied from, the Dutch Constitution. So strong is this Netherland influence upon our American form of government that the Senate of the United States, as a body, derives most of the peculiarities of its organization from the Netherlands States General, a similar body, and its predecessor by nearly a century of years, while even in the American flag we find the colors and the five-pointed star chosen from the Dutch.

"The common modern practice of the State allowing a prisoner the free services of a lawyer for his defence, and the office of a district attorney for each county, are so familiar to us that we regard them as American inventions. Both institutions have been credited to England, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is impossible to find in England even to-day any official corresponding to our district attorney. Both of these institutions existed in Holland three centuries before they were brought to America.