The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom by Hendrik van Loon (classic fiction .txt) 📖
- Author: Hendrik van Loon
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On the same day, when the absent votes of the Batavian Republic saved the third constitution, the preliminaries of the peace between France and England were signed. After seven years of stagnation, the ocean once more was open to Dutch ships, and Dutch commerce once more could visit the furthermost corners of the globe.
The country again could go to work.
Here was a splendid dream of a rejuvenated country eagerly striving to regain its lost importance. But a milkman who comes around once in every seven years will lose his customers. And the Dutch trader, who as the common carrier and the middleman had been for many centuries as regular in the performances of his duties as the useful baker and butcher and grocer of our own domestic acquaintance, found when he came back after half a dozen years that his customers, tired of waiting for him, had gone for their daily needs to a rival and did not contemplate a return to a tradesman who had neglected them during so many years. And when the ships which for seven years had been rotting in the harbours had been sufficiently repaired to venture forth upon the seas, and when they had gathered a cargo of sorts, there was no one to whom they could go to sell their wares.
In the fall of the Dutch Republic we have tried to describe how, gradually, the Hollander lost his markets. This chapter upon our economic condition during the Batavian Republic can be very short. We shall have to describe how, driven out of the legitimate trade, the Dutch shipper entered the wide field of illegitimate business enterprises until at last he disappeared entirely from a field of endeavour in which honesty is not only the best policy but is also the only policy which sooner or later does not lead to ruin. The large commercial houses, of course, could stand several years of depression, but the smaller fry, the humbler brethren who had always kept themselves going on a little floating capital, these were soon obliged either to go out of existence altogether or to enter upon some illicit affair. Quite naturally they chose the latter course, and soon they found themselves in that vast borderland of commerce where honesty merely consists in not being found out.
At first they traded under neutral flags and with neutral papers. But the British during the prolonged war with France did not stick too closely to international law, and every ship that was under suspicion of not being a bona-fide foreign ship, but a Dutch ship under disguise, was confiscated, taken to England, and there publicly sold. Every variation upon the wide subject of fake papers, fake passports, and counterfeit sailing-orders was tried, but invariably these ingenious schemes were discovered by the British policemen who controlled the high seas, and finally this commerce had to be given up entirely as being too risky. Then all sorts of even more wonderful plans were developed by the diligent Dutch traders. Here is a scheme at once so brilliant and so simple that we must relate it:
Messrs. A. and B., honourable merchants from Amsterdam, enter into a partnership. A. goes to London and as an Englishman enters business. B. stays at home. A. equips a privateer. B. loads a ship and gets as much insurance as he possibly can. The ship of B. leaves the Dutch harbour and is captured by the ship of A. It is taken to England and ship and cargo are publicly sold. A. gets the profits of his buccaneering expedition. B. collects the insurance. The partners have in this way made twice the amount of their original investment, minus the insignificant loss on the ship. At the end of the year the two merchants divide the spoils and both get rich. This method had the disadvantage of being too easy. A deadly competition set in. Finally the insurance companies discovered the swindle and refused to insure. That stopped the business.
From that moment on the only way of doing business across the water was to take the risk of capture, to try to run the blockade of the British fleet in the North Seas and reach some safe foreign port. When the year 1801 came hardly a dozen ships which flew the Dutch flag dared to cross the ocean. Not a single whaler was seen off the coast of Greenland; the Dutch fishermen had deserted the North Sea; the channel was closed to Dutch trade; the Mediterranean, where once Dutch had been a commonly understood language, did not see any Dutch ships for many years; the Baltic, the scene of the first Dutch commercial triumphs, no longer witnessed the appearance of the Dutch grain carrier who during so many centuries had provided the daily bread for millions of people. This disappearance of the commercial fleet meant the absolute ruin of many industries which up to that time had been kept alive by such demand as there was for planed wood, nets, rope, tar, and the countless things which went into the making of the old sailing-ship. The eighteenth century had been a bad period for these industries. The beginning nineteenth century killed them. The great manufacturing centres like Leiden and Haarlem became the famous villes mortes about which we like to read, but in which we do not care to live. Hollow streets, grass growing between the cobblestones, a few old families slowly dwindling away and using up the funds of former generations; a population ill fed and badly housed, physically degenerating and morally perishing under the load of philanthropy by which it was kept alive; the whole life of the city, once exuberant and open, retiring to the back room where the sinful world cannot be seen; where, around the family tea table, and with the patriarchal pipe, dull resignation is found in that same Bible which once, and not so many years before, had inspired their ancestors to a display of vitality and of energetic enterprise which has been unsurpassed in European history. All optimism gone to make place for a leaden despondency and a feeling that no attempt of the individual can avail against the higher decrees of a cruel Providence. It is a terrible picture. It remained true for almost three generations. Let us be grateful that we in our own day have seen the last of it.
In the colonies, as has been said before, the same state of ruin existed as at home. The West India Company had been bankrupt for almost a score of years. The colonies in South America, the rich sugar plantations for which once we sacrificed the unprofitable harbour of New York, were in the year 1801 being worked for the benefit of the British conqueror. Holland had lost them and had lost their profits. In the year 1798, by article 247 of the first constitution, the East India Company had been suspended. This enormous commercial institution, which with a minimum of effort had produced a maximum of results, went out of existence like a candle. Her loss was a terrible blow to Amsterdam. During the last years, when the affairs of the company were going from bad to worse, many loans had been taken up to meet the current expenses. Amsterdam, which had the greatest interest in hiding the actual condition of the company, had invariably provided these loans. Its City Bank still had an inexhaustible supply of cash, but with her trade in foreign securities ruined by the long wars, and her trade in domestic securities destroyed by the demise of Dutch manufacturing and Dutch shipping, with the enormous international banking business made impossible by the unsettled conditions of the revolutionary wars, the bank could only be maintained by very doubtful financial expedients. And when this pillar of Dutch society began to tremble upon its foundations, which were no longer sound, what was to become of the Dutch banks?
Failures of large commercial houses became disastrously frequent. Each failure in turn affected larger circles of business institutions. Even the expedient of using some of the ancestral capital became difficult where there was no market for the securities which the people wished to sell. Dividends upon foreign securities were passed year after year; taxes went up higher every six months. Such a long siege upon its prosperity no country could stand. And while the people were thus being impoverished, what did the government and what did the French allies do to bring about some improvement? France did nothing at all. The Dutch Government sometimes sent a mild protest to London and asked the British Government not to confiscate ships under a neutral flag, protestations which of course remained unanswered.
Here is another little sum in arithmetic which will explain more than a lengthy disputation upon the subject of our national ruin. It is a list of the current expenses and revenues for a number of years:
In 1796 expenses and revenue were the same.
But when in 1799 the English and Russians invaded the country and the revenues were appropriated according to the new style provided, the expenses were 80,000,000, the revenue was 36,000,000, and the deficit was 44,000,000. And these deficits, year after year, had to be covered by extra loans, until at last a heavy loan was carried to pay the dividends upon the original loan. Even with the three billions which the republic was reported to have gathered during former centuries, there is but one possible end to such a system of finance: That end is called national bankruptcy.
Whether man is merely a chemical compound driven by economic energies or something higher and more sublime is a question which from the inexperience of our youth we dare not decide. But that something in human society is apt to go wrong the moment the homo sapiens leaves the straight path between the economic too much and too little is a truth which we are willing to defend against all comers. The trouble during revolutionary times is that the well-worn, old-fashioned, narrow road is no longer visible. The old beacons of proper conduct have been removed, new ones have not yet been provided, and people wander hither and thither, and tumble from one extreme into the other.
In the Batavian Republic in 1795, as the Dutch expression has it, the locks were
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