Leyden's University, Haarlem's Flowers, and Amsterdam's Commerce.

Utrecht, October 25, 1902.

We gave only one day to Leyden, ten miles from The Hague, but it was one of the most interesting days we have had in Europe. Taking a guide at the railway station, we traversed the quaint streets and crossed and recrossed the multitudinous canals, and climbed to the top of the great fortified circular mound of earth in the centre of the city, called the Burg, the foundations of which date from the tenth century, and from the top of which we had a unique view of the heroic old town and the peaceful homes of its fifty-four thousand people.

But one does not go far in Leyden without being reminded of the terrible siege to which it was subjected by the Spaniards in 1574. One such reminder is the bronze statue of the gallant Mayor Van der Werf, who defended the city in that siege and would listen to no suggestion of surrender. Another is an inscription on the front of the Stadhuis, which, translated, reads: "When the black famine had brought to the death nearly six thousand persons, then God the Lord repented and gave us bread again as much as we could wish"; and which in the original Dutch is an ingenious chronogram, the capital letters as Roman numerals giving the date, and the one hundred and thirty-one letters used in the original indicating the number of days during which the siege lasted. But, after a short and partial relief, the siege was continued in the form of a blockade for many dreadful months. William of Orange finally cut the dykes and flooded the country, and relieved the famished city by ships.

The story of Leyden which made the deepest impression upon me as a boy was that of William's offering to reward the citizens for this gallant defence either by exempting them from taxes for a certain number of years or by the establishment of a university in their city. To their everlasting honor they chose the latter, even in that time of distress and poverty, and the University was founded in 1575. Of course we wished to see the University which had such a history as that, to say nothing of the fact that we had heard of Leyden jars ever since we began the study of electricity at college, and that we knew something of a few of the men whose genius has at different periods since made the faculty one of the most illustrious in Europe, such as "the learned Scaliger," the famous physician Boerhaave, Arminius and Gomar, champions, respectively, of the two theological schools known as Arminians or Remonstrants and Calvinists, which in 1618 brought their differences to debate in the famous Synod of Dort; and, as is always the case when an opportunity for thorough discussion on the basis of Scripture is given, the result was a victory for the Calvinists. We remembered also with pleasure that Oliver Goldsmith, author of the immortal Vicar of Wakefield, was for a time a student at the University of Leyden; and we recalled with less pleasure that in our own day the faculty of the institution had furnished one of the boldest advocates of the destructive criticism of the Old Testament, Professor Abraham Kuenen.

It was a satisfaction to see it, though there is little to see; this University, like most of those on the continent, having very indifferent buildings and appointments. The men who sometimes "kick" in American colleges and seminaries because the class-rooms and dormitories do not suit them, to say nothing of their board, would get a superabundance of that sort of exercise if they had to attend the average Dutch or German university. In fact, it has been intimated at times that there are men in American colleges and seminaries who belong to that class of people of whom it was suggested that they would grumble even after getting to heaven on the ground that their haloes didn't fit. Fortunately, however, these are very few, the great majority of our American students being not spoiled and fussy children, but manly, sensible, hard working, plain living, high thinking men.

Before leaving Leyden we made a point of visiting the house in which the Rev. John Robinson lived. He was the leader of the first Puritans who were banished from England, and who, like the adherents of every other persecuted faith, found toleration and liberty in Calvinistic Holland. A bronze tablet affixed to the wall of the church on the opposite side of the street contains a bas-relief of the Mayflower, and states that it was at Mr. Robinson's prompting that the Pilgrim Fathers went forth to settle New England in 1620.

As we passed with our guide through what looked like an open-air beef market, he surprised us not a little by telling us that what the people were buying there was not beef, but horse flesh, which is much cheaper, adding that the worn-out dray horses and car horses of the English cities were regularly bought and shipped to Holland to be sold to the poor instead of beef. No doubt the people of Leyden became accustomed to much worse fare than that when, during the great siege of 1574, the Spaniards were trying to starve them into resubmission to Roman Catholicism. But those conditions no longer exist, and the idea of eating horse flesh as a regular thing is not one which commends itself to our feelings.

This place, seventeen miles from Leyden, also had experience of the tender mercies of the papal soldiery when, in 1573, after a gallant defence of seven months, it fell into the hands of the Spaniards, and the entire garrison, the Protestant ministers of the gospel, and two thousand of the townspeople were executed. Haarlem is now, and has been for two hundred and fifty years, famous for its horticulture. It supplies bulbs to every part of the world, and in the spring the nurseries around the city are ablaze with the brilliant blooms of the tulips, hyacinths, crocuses and lilies, whole fields of them in every variety of color, like vast natural flags of the brightest hues, lying on the flat surface of the country, and the whole atmosphere is impregnated with their delicious fragrance.

Two centuries and a half ago, at the time of the "Tulip Mania," there was as wild speculation in bulbs as there has ever been in our day in stocks. Enormous prices were paid for the rarer bulbs. For instance, a single bulb of the species called "Semper Augustus" was sold for five thousand two hundred dollars. This statement will not seem incredible to any of my readers who have had bitter experience with the fictitious values created by the "booms" which cursed and crippled so many of our Southern communities a few years ago. The tulip craze in Holland had the same history: the mania subsided, the prices fell, many of the speculators were ruined, and before long a "Semper Augustus" could be bought for twenty dollars. Even that will seem to most people a pretty high price for a single tulip bulb.

We did not stop at Haarlem, as it was not the right season for the gorgeous display of flowers above referred to, that is, the latter part of April and the beginning of May, but pushed on to Amsterdam, which is only ten miles away. If the reader has taken account of the distances between these populous cities as they have been successively mentioned, and has observed how short they are, he will have received a very strong impression of the smallness of the country.

Amsterdam, the largest city in Holland, with a population of more than half a million, is built upon nearly a hundred islands, separated from one another by a network of canals and connected by means of some three hundred bridges, and is, therefore, sometimes spoken of as "a vulgar Venice," but, with its prodigious vitality, its crowded streets, its busy waters, and its financial eminence, it must be far more like the Venice which was Queen of the Adriatic some centuries ago than the stagnant and melancholy town which bears that name to-day.

The water in the canals is about three feet deep, and below this is a layer of mud of the same thickness. It is said that, in order to prevent malarial exhalations, the water is constantly renewed from an arm of the North Sea Canal and the mud removed by dredging. I hope this process is effective, but there were unmistakable exhalations from the canals when we were there. Whether they were malarial or not I cannot say, but certainly they were unfragrant to a degree. Still, the evil smells of Amsterdam are not to be named in number and vigor with those of Venice.

As in Venice, so here, all the houses are built on piles which are driven fifteen or twenty feet through the loose sand near the surface into the firmer layers below. Hence the jest of Erasmus, that he knew a city whose inhabitants dwelt on the tops of trees like rooks. They are not so secure on their perch, however, as the rooks. For, although the preparations underground are often more costly than the buildings afterwards erected above, yet, such is the difficulty of securing a firm foundation, and such the ravages of the wood worm among the fir-tree piles after they are driven into the sand and built upon, that many of the brick houses which were once erect are now considerably out of the perpendicular, and lean backwards or forwards or sideways, according as the piles have given way at one place or another. In 1822 thirty-four hundred tons of grain were stored in a grain magazine originally built for the East India Company, and, the piles being unable to sustain the weight, the building literally sank down into the mud.

Besides its importance as a mart for the tobacco, sugar, rice, spices, and other produce of the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, West Indies and South America (which, by the way, have a population of thirty-five million, that is, seven times as many as the little mother country), Amsterdam has a number of important industrial establishments, such as ship-yards, sugar and camphor refineries, cobalt-blue and candle factories, machine shops, breweries, and especially diamond-polishing mills, of which last there are no less than seventy, employing in all about ten thousand men. We visited one of these mills and watched the process for a few minutes.

The art of polishing diamonds was introduced here in the sixteenth century by Portuguese Jews, who, driven from their former homes by papal persecution, found in Protestant Holland an asylum, and, like the oppressed adherents of other creeds, secured the full religious toleration which they craved. They have ever since constituted an important part of the population of Amsterdam, and now number about thirty-five thousand. One of the interesting episodes of our visit was a drive through the poorer Jewish Quarter, with its swarms of untidy men, women and children. In this quarter and of this stock Spinoza, the philosopher, was born; and in this quarter, though not of this stock, Rembrandt, the painter, lived for fifteen years, in a house marked by a tablet, which those who are specially interested in art always wish to see.

Utrecht, twenty-two miles from Amsterdam, is an attractive city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. It interested us chiefly as the centre of the Jansenists, the redoubtable Roman Catholic adversaries of the Jesuits, and as the peaceful home of ex-President Kruger since his withdrawal from the stormy experiences of his life in South Africa. This venerable man, so remarkable on account of his public career, is of special interest to any one connected with Union Seminary in Virginia, because it was under the ministry of a former student of our Seminary, the late Dr. Daniel Lindley, who went as a missionary to South Africa more than sixty years ago, that Mr. Kruger was brought into the church. He lives in great comfort on the famous Malieban, which, with its triple row of lime trees, is one of the loveliest residential districts in Europe.

It seems odd that in a country where there is so much water, there should be so little that is fit to drink, and that in a country where land is so valuable the people should use any part of it for fuel, and yet, not only does one constantly see dog-carts containing barrels of fresh water and loads of peat passing hither and thither in the towns, but at cellar doors in the side streets sign-boards are seen announcing "water and fire to sell," and at these places the poorer classes buy the boiling water or red-hot turf that they need to make their tea or coffee. Foot-warmers are very generally used by the Dutch women, and in some of the churches we saw immense numbers of these little fireboxes.

This reminds me to say, for the benefit of any of my readers who may be planning a trip to Europe, that two things are more conducive to comfort and health than a good hot-water bottle when one is travelling in Northern or Central Europe, for these lands are much colder than ours in spring, summer and autumn, and arrangements for heating the hotels either do not exist or are utterly ineffective. American tourists who do not observe this precaution are likely to need physic, and, by the way, the universal sign for drug stores in Holland is not the mortar and pestle, but "the gaper," that is, a painted Turk's head showing his tongue.

In Amsterdam and other Dutch cities many of the houses, which are made of brick with light colored painting and have a very substantial and neat appearance, are narrow and high, standing with ornamented gable ends to the street, and have beams projecting from the gables with fixtures for hoisting goods to the top stories, which are used for store-rooms. These are not business houses, but dwelling houses of people well to do, and the windows and woodwork from top to bottom are scrupulously clean and bright.

Broeck, in the north of Holland, is said to be the original Spotless Town. We did not visit this place, but it is thus described by a writer in Public Opinion who has done so:

"The palings of the fences of Broeck are sky-blue. The streets are paved with shining bricks of many colors. The houses are rose-colored, black, gray, purple, light blue or pale green. The doors are painted and gilded. For hours you may not see a soul in the streets or at the windows. The streets and houses, bridges, windows and barns show a neatness and a brilliancy that are absolutely painful.

"At every step a new effect is disclosed, a new scene is beheld, as if painted upon the drop-curtain of a stage. Everything is minute, compact, painted, spotless and clean. In the houses of Broeck for cleaning purposes you will find big brooms, little brooms, tooth-brushes, aqua fortis, whiting for the window panes, rouge for the forks and spoons, coal dust for the copper, emery for the iron utensils, brick powder for the floors, and even small splinters of wood with which to pick out the tiny bits of straw in the cracks between the bricks. Here are some of the rules of this wonderful town:

"Citizens must leave their shoes at the door when entering a house.

"Before or after sunset no one is allowed to smoke excepting with a pipe having a cover, so that the ashes will not be scattered upon the street.

"Any one crossing the village on horseback must get out of the saddle and lead the horse.

"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.

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!"

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.

"The equal distribution of property among the children of a person dying intestate—that is, without a will—was brought to America direct from Holland by the Puritans. It never existed in England.

"The record of all deeds and mortgages in a public office, a custom which affects every man and woman who owns or buys property, came to America direct from Holland. It never came from England, since it does not exist there even at the present day.

"The township system, by which each town has local self-government, with its natural sequence of local self-government in county and State, came from Holland.

"The practice of making prisoners work, and turning prisons into workhouses, and, in fact, our whole modern American management of free prisons which has caused the admiration of the entire world, was brought from Holland to America by William Penn.

"Group these astonishing facts together, if you will, and see their tremendous import: The Federal Constitution; the Declaration of Independence; the whole organization of the Senate; our State Constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town, county and State systems of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages; the giving of every criminal a just chance for his life; a public prosecutor of crime in every county; our free prison workhouse system—to say nothing of kindred important and vital elements in our national life. When each and all of these can be traced directly to one nation, or to the influence of that nation, and that nation not England, is it any wonder, asks one enlightened historian, that some modern scholars, who, looking beneath the mere surface resemblance of language, seek an explanation of the manifest difference between the people of England and the people of the United States assumed by them to be of the same blood, and influenced by the same (?) institutions?

"Nor is it strange that so strong a Dutch influence should have entered into the establishment and making of America, when one considers the immense debt which the world owes to Holland. For it may be said without fear of contradiction that in nearly every art which uplifts and adorns human life, in nearly every aspect of human endeavor, Holland has not only added to the moral resources of mankind and contributed more to the fabric of civilization, but has also actually led the way. It was the first nation to master the soil and teach agriculture to the world. It has taught the world the art of gardening. It taught commerce and merchandise to the entire world when it ranked as the only great commercial nation on the globe. It taught the broadest lines of finance to the world by the establishment, in 1609, of its great Bank of Amsterdam, with one hundred and eighty millions of dollars deposits, preceding the establishment of the Bank of England by nearly one hundred years. The founding of its great University of Leyden, in 1575, marked an epoch in the world's history of education, and made the Netherlands the centre of learning of Europe. Here was founded international law through Grotius, one of Holland's greatest sons. Here Boerhaave, a Dutchman, revolutionized medicine by his wonderful discoveries until Holland's medical school became the seat of authority for all Europe. From this centre, too, came that great lesson in the publishing of books in the shape of the famous Elzevir books. It was the first nation to place the reader and the spelling-book in the hands of the child, irrespective of station or means. As musicians, for nearly two hundred years the Netherlands stood supreme, and furnished all the courts of Europe with vocal and instrumental music. It was the Dutch who founded, in Naples, the first musical conservatory in the world, and another in Venice, and it was to their influence and example that the renowned school of Rome owed its existence.

"The starting of all these masterful influences would alone make a nation great. But these were only a part of Holland's wonderful contributions to the world's enlightenment. It went on and introduced to the world the manufacture of woollen cloth that marked an epoch in history, and followed this up by developing the manufacture of silk, linen, tapestry and lace until it made its city of Flanders the manufacturing centre of the world. It devised and presented through the Van Eyck brothers the wonderful discovery of oil painting, and revolutionized the world of art, and gave, in the person of one of these brothers, Jan Van Eyck, the originator of the painted portrait. Then came the invention of wood-engraving by a Dutchman, followed quickly by the printing of books from blocks; the substitution of movable type for the solid block of wood, and we have the printing-press—the invention of which Germany may never concede to Holland, and yet the germ of which lay in the block books to which Holland lays unquestioned claim. But Holland need never squabble over a single invention. A nation that, in addition to what has been cited above, has likewise invented the telescope, the microscope, the thermometer, the method of measuring degrees of latitude and longitude, the pendulum clock, thereby putting before the world the beginning of anything which we can call accuracy in time, and discovered the capillary circulation of the blood, need not stop to split straws.

There is a wonderful charm in reading the history of a people who have done so much toward the enlightenment of the world, and not alone in one field of thought or activity, but in every field of human endeavor. The people of no nation make so bold and strong an impression on the mind as one after another of their achievements pass before one, and especially when it is considered that all these contributions to humankind were done with one hand while the other was busy in saving every foot of land from the rushing waters. But the people always remained cool, balanced and solid. That same patient but deep, perfervid spirit which built the dykes and saved the land with one hand, and opened those same dykes, built by the very life-blood of the people, with the other, and flooded the land against encroaching enemies—that same spirit built up a nation unrivalled in history as a financial, commercial, maritime, art, learning, medical and political centre, from which have radiated the strongest influences for the upbuilding of great empires—not only in the new Western world of America, but also in the far East of the Indies, and in the strong colonial establishment of South Africa. Her glory may be of the past, but he is indeed a rash prophet who would predict the future of any nation, however small, on the face of the globe of to-day. Of some things the American traveller is to-day constantly convinced: that there is less intellectual veneer in Holland than in any other country in Europe; that there is more solid and abiding culture of the very highest kind, and that the modern Dutch family represents a repose of mind, a simplicity of living, and a contented happiness with life in general that we, as a nation, might well envy."