HOLLAND AN HISTORICAL ESSAY _________ THE DEBT OF THE UNITED STATES TO THE NETHERLANDS HE debt of America to Holland is difficult of estimation. If only the most obvious of the items, those for which the United States is self-evidently a debtor, be enumerated, the list is of amazing length. Of all the western world Holland first established religious toleration, the principle which is one of the main foundations of the “American Idea,” if not the greatest. As the first modern Republic, Holland set the example of political equality that has gradually revolutionized this western world. In the realm of international law her place is supreme. The American peace treaty policy of today is of Netherland descent. The acceptance by the State of the obligation of educating the entire population, male and female, regardless of birth or property, was borrowed bodily from the Dutch. Public schools, free to the children of the poor and charging a small sum to the well-to-do, had been established in the Netherlands by the middle of the fourteenth century, centuries before the founders of Massachusetts came to live in the city of Leyden. These were supported by taxes paid into the public treasury. In 1582 Friesland provided for the official selection of schoolmasters in the towns and villages, and in the following year Zeeland insisted upon general education “because it is the foundation of the commonwealth,” as the school law reads. From this beginning the supervision of education by the State soon spread over the whole country. In 1609 John of Nassau, oldest brother of William the Silent, wrote to his son, Stadtholder of Friesland, praising the system of free popular education: “Soldiers and patriots thus educated, with a true knowledge of God and a Christian conscience, besides churches and schools, good libraries, books and printing presses, are better than all armies, arsenals, armories, munitions, alliances and treaties that can be imagined in the world.” We are accustomed to such arguments in the twentieth century, but such sentiments were most unusual in those dark days when might made right and popular education was often regarded as a danger in the rest of Europe. The free schools in the first New England colonies and the comprehensive system of popular education which have developed in the most remote parts of the United States, play a very important part in the general enlightenment of America. An enormous proportion of the great American statesmen, executives and inventors, born in the country districts, might have been doomed to perpetual oblivion but for the time they spent in the ever-present “district school” assimilating the three “R's.” The first free schools in America, open to all and supported by the government, were established by the Dutch settlers of New York, and even at the present time, true to her Dutch founders, the Empire State leads the rest of the country in the excellence and number of her schools and the enormous sums appropriated by her State Legislature for their support. As in Holland, so in the United States, there is a large foreign population seeking in the new country what centuries ago they sought in the old: the right to make a decent living without unjust interference, and it is the children of these aliens that make the citizens of tomorrow; citizens that in most cases, owing to the fine schools they have attended, will add materially to the growth and prosperity of the adopted country of their often more or less uneducated parents. In free universities also Holland was America's preceptor. Higher education of the people of the Netherlands was never neglected. For this purpose were established the classical schools, now called gymnasiums, corresponding to the American high schools. These were to be found in every large city in the Netherlands. The most famous was at Dordrecht. It was founded in 1290, and by 1635 had a matriculation of six hundred pupils, many coming from France and Germany. Something has already been said of the famous University of Leyden which opened in 1575. By 1638 four universities had been established in this small country, all of them of remarkable excellence and with famous instructors gathered from the nations of the earth, regardless of religious beliefs or other prejudices. When the Pilgrims went to Leyden in 1609 they found to their surprise that the Netherlands was a country of schools supported by the State. “A land,” according to Motley, “where every child went to school, where almost every individual inhabitant could read and write, where even the middle classes were proficient in mathematics and the classics and could speak two or more modern languages.” When Roman Catholicism was abolished as State Church in the Netherlands, the ecclesiastical property was devoted to education, to charitable institutions and to the support of the clergy, quite in contrast to the distribution of similar wealth in England by Henry VIII, who claimed for himself what he did not distribute among his favorites. And to what country is America indebted for the origin of its great charitable institutions? Surely, next in importance to the education of children comes the care of the incompetents and unfortunates in a community. The Netherlanders realized at an early date the beneficial results of the systematic care of these citizens, and as a consequence the writers of every age have exclaimed over the remarkably efficient institutions in the Netherlands for this purpose. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Dutch led the world in caring for the decrepit and the unfortunate. Hospitals provided with every convenience were always open to the sick and aged, and in addition to these were old people's homes similar to the modern ones, in which for payment of a moderate sum care was assured an old person for the remainder of his life. In each town persons of wealth and responsibility were biennially appointed to receive alms in the churches and principal places of resort and to administer such funds at their discretion, to which were added the proceeds of a small tax and the bequests of the charitable. Under their direction the poor were so well cared for that they were under no necessity to beg. The children of such as were unable to support them were brought up until a certain age at the expense of the State, and then bound out as apprentices to some trade or manufacture. In times of scarcity the authorities of the town distributed food among the needy, whether native or foreign born. So frugal and industrious were the people that except on rare occasion there were few requiring alms save the sick, maimed and aged. The vast numbers of widows and orphans that the struggle with Spain inevitably created, together with the disabled soldiers and sailors were never neglected or forgotten by the people of the Netherlands. With the proceeds of the confiscated church property, asylums and hospitals were founded in every town to care for such unfortunates. In these institutions administered with wisdom and economy and provided with every comfort, the orphans were educated and the widows and the veterans spent their years in ease. The magistrates of the cities were called upon to take an oath “to protect widows, orphans and miserable persons.” When we consider that at this time England was overrun with sturdy beggars, and that her soldiers and sailors when not in active service were allowed to die neglected in the streets, it is very evident where the United States acquired the ideas that have led to the establishment of the soldiers' homes, orphan asylums and hospitals for the sick and wounded of which the present-day American is so justly proud. Voltaire, though he left Holland in anger, said that in her capital cities he saw “neither an idle man nor a poor man nor a dissipated man nor an insolent man,” and that he had seen everywhere “labor and modesty.” Amsterdam at the conclusion of the war with Spain, spent a million dollars annually on her public charities. Owen Feltham, an English Royalist and High Churchman, writing as a contemporary, devotes a very interesting page of his “Observations” to the public institutions of the Netherlands at this time. More than any array of the multitudinous facts in the case, this statement of an Englishman of the period throws light on the subject. Let it speak for itself: “You would think,” says he, “being with them, you were in old Israel, for you find not a beggar among them. Nor are they mindful of their own alone, but strangers also partake of their care and bounty. If they will depart, they will have money for their convoy. If they will stay, they will have work provided. If unable, they find a hospital. The deprivation of manners they punish with contempt, but the defects of nature they favor with charity. Even their Bedlam is a place so curious that a lord might live in it. Their hospital might lodge a lady; so that safely you may conclude amongst them even poverty and madness do both inhabit handsomely. And though vice makes everything turn sordid, yet the State will have the very correction of it to be near, as if they would show that, though obedience fail, yet government must be still itself and decent. To prove this they that do but view their Bridewell will think it might receive a gentleman, though a gallant, and so their prison a wealthy citizen. But for a poor man 'tis his best policy to be laid there for he that cast him in must maintain him.” Modern Holland is worthy of its great tradition in this respect as well as in all others. When in 1914 its sister country, Belgium, overrun by foreign soldiers, was suffering all the horrors of war, the people of Belgium fled by the thousands, nay by the hundred thousands, across the border into Holland. The flag of Holland was floating over the sign posts indicating the Dutch frontier, the frontier of the land of liberty and charity. Thousands of homeless wanderers saw this flag waving to them a friendly welcome, if they could see at all, blinded by tears as they were. And over the border these poor people streamed in endless procession, the rich and the poor, the sane and the insane, the hale and the cripples, the law-abiding and the lawless–for poor Belgium gave up its population from the cities and the fields, from the homes, the factories and the asylums. And all of them were made welcome. It was a heavy burden Holland was staggering under. It not only kept its whole army under the colors, marking time at the frontier and in the fortress, ready to defend the country's honor and liberty, but in addition thousands of its own people had been compelled by the war conditions prevailing in Europe generally to join the ranks of the unemployed, and now it harbored refugees variously estimated in numbers between seven hundred thousand and a million, refugees mostly destitute of all the necessaries of life. Nevertheless, the people of Holland, true to their heroic past, rose to the occasion and not a mouth was left unfed, not a body unsheltered, and when a powerful neighbor offered to pay part of the expenses the Queen's government quietly answered that it would discharge its own obligation of charity and benevolence. What a tremendous undertaking for a numerically small nation already suffering under industrial distress! But to return to our subject— It was the Dutch that first adopted the plan now generally in vogue in the United States of making the convicts work at some useful trade during their confinement, rather than herding them together like unclean animals with no measure of time but light and darkness. The prisons were clean, the prisoners well fed and decently treated, and the dreadful prison fevers, the result of unspeakable conditions in other European prisons, were unknown in the Dutch penitentiaries. John Howard, the great English reformer, claimed in 1772 that more persons died from the jail-fever than on the gallows, although there were at that time one hundred and sixty offenses punishable by death in England. Even the judges sitting in the court of criminal assizes had to take precautions that this disease would not “attack them from the prisoners' dock.” While in England the wretched inmates were obliged to pay in some manner for their food and the straw upon which they slept, and were often compelled to remain in prison after their term had expired for lack of funds to pay their jailor, in the Dutch jails the prisoners were given the same food as the seamen, with beer, and were only required to do a very moderate amount of work. While elsewhere men and women were huddled together, and helpless children subjected to the revolting horrors of the common cell, in Holland there was a separate prison for women, where they were employed in spinning and sewing, slept but two in a room, and were well fed, while the children were cared for in the numerous institutions for that purpose. The Dutch prison reports of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries read very much like those of the more enlightened countries of the twentieth century, and very much indeed like those of the United States of today. The Netherlands, from the very nature of their land, were forced to be constructive; in a material way they had nothing to destroy. Naturally, they became as careful in other matters, and placed too high a value on human life to destroy or blight it unnecessarily, a sentiment entirely unknown in the countries where the feudal system placed the worth of a man at a little less than that of a horse or other valuable animal. There is another phase of the Dutch nature which had a lasting effect upon America, and which in view of the present-day agitation on the subject is of more than passing importance. The position of the women of Holland was always a matter of wonderment to the traveling Latin or Englishman. They were a little disposed to poke fun at the man who was willing to consult his wife upon important questions and to accept her word as law in any matter pertaining to the home. To these travelers the levelheaded, calm-eyed Dutch “huis vrouw,” schooled like her husband and ruling her home with a rod of iron, was a revelation. Under the common law of England, which allowed a man to beat his wife, provided he used a stick no larger than his finger, the women were dependent upon the personal justice of their men to almost as great an extent as a slave upon the gentleness of his master. Thanks to some very modern writers whose more or less interesting “Impressions of America and the Americans” are as numerous as the sands of the sea, the position of the American woman as viewed by the average European today is not hard to determine. Some look with interest, some with horror, and all with surprise at the freedom enjoyed by wives in the United States, at the advanced ideas of the women, and of their calm acceptance by American men as being the just due of their life partners. It is somewhat amusing to notice how very identical were the criticisms of the position of the women of Holland by the progenitors of these up-to-date travelers in the United States. Even the sympathetic De Amicis, in the nineteenth century, writes with wonder that the engaged girls in Holland were allowed to receive their fiances unattended, and that even the unmarried young ladies of the better class were free to make calls at distant parts of the cities, unchaperoned and fearless of being molested, and in all respects were allowed perfect freedom. Guicciardini, writing in the sixteenth century, voices almost the same impressions: “They go out alone to make visits, and even journeys without evil report; they are able to take care of themselves. Moreover, they are housekeepers, and love their households.” Coeducation began in the Netherlands. In Holland the girls of every class receive the same schooling as their brothers. They are educated, treated as equals by their husbands, mingle in all the business of life, and in many cases take entire charge of the family property. Their opinion is listened to with respect. Wise men have said that the position of the wife and mother throws the most light upon the civilization of a people. Tried by this test alone, the Netherlands stood two centuries in advance of the rest of Europe, at the time of the settlement of America, and America did well to adopt this advanced feminine policy long prevailing in the Netherlands.