Verzamelde werken. Deel 2. Nederland

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How Holland became a nation^*

The theme I have chosen for my two lectures: How Holland became a nation, implies a preliminary question of a more general nature, namely: What is a nation? - Everybody seems to know quite well, yet on trying to define it the difficulty begins. Having a language in common of course is no test at all: Brazilians and Portuguese are different nations, so are Americans and Englishmen. On the other hand the Swiss most decidedly form a nation, though being devided into three different linguistic groups. Political unity and independence are strong factors in making a nation; yet sometimes nations have persisted as such for centuries, though lacking independence, as the Irish for instance, or both: independence and cohesion, as the Poles. Racial characteristics are altogether misleading and vague for the purpose of determining nationalities. There is hardly a greater danger to sound historical learning than those biassed theories of race, so popular nowadays.

Perhaps the most attractive answer to the question: What is a nation? was given by the celebrated French scholar Ernest Renan, in a lecture here at Leyden some fifty years ago. That which keeps a nation together, he said, is the fact of having done great things together and being willing to do so still. - If not quite exhaustive as a definition it certainly can serve for a motto.

Even by a rapid glance over the large field of national differences existing to-day, we realize that the notion of nationality varies in each individual case. Some nations of Europe appear early in history as a distinct and almost unchangeable whole. Take for instance Denmark and Portugal. Both had segregated nearly a thousand years ago from the larger ethnographical complexes, here the Iberian, there the Skandinavian, to which they originally belonged. Their political status underwent but little variation. Till recent times both formed stable national kingdoms. Apart from Portugal's colonial empire and Denmark's former sway over Norway their linguistic and political areas coincided. There was no expansion of the national frontier, no assimilation of alien populations within the nation's territory, no lasting rupture of the national whole.

* Uit Lectures on Holland, delivered in the University of Leyden during the first Netherlands week for American students, July 7-12, 1924. Leyden, A.W. Sijthoff's Publishing Company, 1924, pp. 1-18.

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Now look at England. What a number of ethnographical and political elements had to succeed each other and cooperate, before the English nation arose: Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, Norman. Geographical conditions seemed to predispose Great Britain for national unity, and yet even now Scotland is not England, and Welsh and Gaelic are spoken to this day. Wales offers an instance of a quite distinct and very live national unit comprised within the limits of a larger one, and proves that even the fact of belonging to two nationalities at the same time, a primary and a secondary one, is not impossible.

Let us now look at some cases, where a nation is the outcome of a long process of political development. Your own country, even by its name, the United States, betrays that a political nexus is the basis of its national existence. Can we go so far as to assert that in America the State has created the nation? - Decidedly not, yet it seems safe to maintain that political events have been a main factor in forming the American nation.

The same holds good of Switserland and of Holland. Here too, political circumstances concurred with geographical conditions in founding independence and national unity. The American nation, the Swiss and the Dutch have in common the feature of being comparatively recent products of a rather complicated development. At a time when Danes, Poles and Portuguese were known in Europe as distinct nations, let us say about 1300, there was neither a Swiss nor a Dutch nation. Nor of course an American, because Columbus had yet to be born.

Can it be quite fortuitous that these three young nations, Americans, Swiss and Hollanders, have yet another feature in common, namely the strong element of conscious will in the genesis of their national being? - We shall leave that question aside and now confine ourselves to Holland.

I must here warn you, that I shall use the term Holland sometimes synonymous with Netherland, as you do yourselves, sometimes to denote the province of Holland, now divided into North and South Holland, that is the County of Holland of the Middle Ages. Speaking of the Netherlands in the plural I shall often mean the present kingdoms of Holland and Belgium taken together.

The case of Holland is by far the most complicated of the three instances enumerated just now. For here we have consecutively first

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a process of conglomeration of different territories, and their segregation from larger units, and then a lasting breach severing the just formed whole into two parts. Figure to yourselves for a moment that the War of Secession had torn the United States asunder, and that the North and the South had furthermore developed each along their own rather different lines. That is about what happened two times over to the Netherlands, though by totally unlike causes and in quite different circumstances. To describe the growth of Holland as a nation we shall have to speak of Belgium too. Both together at one time formed the Low Countries, the Netherlands.

The name seems to imply that at the bottom of their history is their geographical status of being river deltas and depressed regions. But this fact in itself does not account for their particular development. Moreover Netherlands, Low Countries, Pays-Bas, as a proper name for them, is of rather recent origin. It does not appear before the end of the 14th century. Still the significance of this geographical situation is very important. Here in this region three large rivers flowed into the sea close together: the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt. Their deltas even intermingled. Now the Rhine took its course through the main part of Germany. The Meuse flowed through Romanic speaking regions as far as its lower course. So did the Scheldt.

These territories formed part of that middle zone, stretching from the North sea to the Mediterranean, where the Germanic and the Romanic elements of Europe met. (I believe you are wont in America to use the terms Germanic and Romanic, as we do on the Continent, and not to follow the English use of saying Teutonic and Romance. So I shall say Germanic and Romanic.) The conquering Franks pushing southward and westward, had subjugated Gaul and Germany together, but southward from a line stretching right across Belgium of to-day, they did not maintain their Germanic speech or an ethnographical distinction from the earlier inhabitants. They became Romanized. This linguistic frontier has hardly changed since more than a thousand years.

Three of the large divisions of ancient Germanic peoples had a share in forming the population of these lower regions. Frisians had dwelt along the coast since Julius Caesar's days. They are one of the very few original Germanic tribes that neither changed place nor name; they only expanded over a somewhat wider area than they

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originally inhabited. To this day our province of Friesland retains the old stock and the old speech. The Frisian element has doubtless contributed very essentially to give our nation its peculiar stamp.

Our eastern provinces formed the outermost part of the territory of the continental Saxons, stretching eastward over North West Germany. The southern provinces: Brabant, Guelders, a part of Holland, were inhabited by Franks, not Romanized Franks as in Gaul, but Germanic-speaking Franks. So they formed a continuous whole with South West Germany, which was frankish from the Lower Rhine to the sources of the Main.

Consequently there was as yet no ethnographical frontier separating these low countries from the main land of Germany. Still, they already possessed one peculiar ethnographical feature: the Frankish, Saxon and Frisian elements were interwoven and blended here, to a degree which did not exist elsewhere and which makes it difficult to decide for the several parts of our country, whether they must be called Frankish, Saxon or Frisian. Such a blending of various components might easily result in engendering a new ethnographical type.

When the great Frankish Empire of Charlemagne was broken up in the 9th century, almost the whole of these regions, after some oscillations, remained incorporated in the new German Empire that was to be, from about 950 till 1250, the first power of Christendom. Only Flanders, except its eastern section, fell to the share of the Western kingdom, the realm of France.

The new political demarcation did not coincide with the linguistic frontier between the Romanic and the Germanic population. The main part of Flanders was purely Germanic of speech, though belonging to France, while on the other side, Hainault, Namur and Liège, purely Romanic of speech, formed part of the German Empire. This disharmony of political and ethnographical border-lines could not fail to promote a loosening of political ties and a strengthening of cultural ones.

From the political point of view all these territories, in the Middle Ages, were outskirts. What power could the king of France exercise over such a remote fief as Flanders? He might succeed in subjecting to the crown the great fiefs of inner France: Champagne, Anjou, Normandy etc., Flanders remained semi-independent. The same holds good of the power of the German Emperors over their low-country domain. As the imperial power declined, these regions were the first

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to lose contact with the central power, and follow their own way, under a number of feudal dynasties, which had sprung up here.

So far there was going on a process of political segregation, without a necessary complement of mutual agglomeration of these territories themselves. But now another factor of historical development comes in, namely the economic forces, which in their turn are closely connected with geographical conditions.

Look at the situation of these regions: halfway between Northern Europe and South Western Europe, over against England, communicating by a great many navigable streams with the hinterland of Germany and France. If anywhere, trade and navigation must begin to flourish here. And so they had done for ages: as early as the 9th century Frisian merchants visited the fairs of Saint Denis; Frisian cloth (whatever Frisian may mean here) was widely known as an article of trade. Now, even without the stimulus of navigation and trade, a level soil, easily accessible by water to friend and foe, is apt to engender municipal agglomerations. A great many fortified towns spring up here, when the great resurrection of municipal life begins about 1100. From the thirteenth century onward the Netherlands have been most essentially a country of towns.

Now, in the Middle Ages, perhaps even more than in other epochs, town-life has been the great factor of cultural development. The most marked and glorious manifestations of mediaeval civilization: the art of the cathedrals, the learning of the universities, are closely connected with the flourishing of cities: in Italy, in France, in Spain, in Germany, in England.

Economic development in these low countries had produced cultural harmony and cohesion, where ethnographical unity was lacking and political unity could not yet exist.

I am speaking of the 13th and 14th centuries, I am thinking of Bruges, Ghent, unhappy Ypres, Brussels, Tournay, Valenciennes, Lille, French-speaking and Flemish-speaking towns alike, but all towns which now do not belong to Holland but to Belgium. The towns of Holland, of tardier growth and less importance than those of Flanders and Brabant, followed in the rear; they were not yet centres of civilization as Bruges or Ghent. Dordrecht and Middelburg were developing a lively trade, Haarlem and Leyden were just arising, Amsterdam was still a fishermen's village, all of them at best townships of a diminutive size.

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The cultural unity I mentioned was furthered by the fact that by this time, that is about 1300, the Germanic tongue of Flanders, Brabant, Holland proper etc. had come to differ so much from the Low German and High German dialects spoken more eastward, as to form a language of its own: the Middle-Dutch, from which our present Dutch language immediately derives. Its difference from Low and High German was partly due to internal linguistic development, partly to the mingling of Frankish, Saxon and Frisian elements, and not in the last place to the fact that it remained open to a continuous influence from the French, which, without altering its purely Germanic character, gave a direction of its own to its development.

So, when focussing our historical telescope on the Netherlands of the beginning of the 14th century, we feel entitled to admit the existence of a sort of loose cultural unity embracing territories of both Romanic and Germanic stock. But to conclude from this that there then existed a Netherlandish (I must use this word) nation, would be altogether wrong. There might be independence, or nearly, both from France and the Empire, there was no political cohesion among the Netherlands themselves. The counts of Flanders were at war with those of Holland about the possession of Zeeland, which ultimately remained to Holland. The counts of Holland wanted to conquer Friesland. Violent dissensions between Holland and Utrecht or Guelders were frequent till the end of the Middle Ages. And it must be observed that the peoples of those territories heartily shared the enmities of their rulers. Moreover the linguistic unity did not extend beyond Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Utrecht, over Friesland, Guelders etc. The Frisians strove to the last to maintain their secular liberty, Guelders was far more akin to the German territories of the Lower Rhine than to Holland or Brabant.

National coherence would never have been brought about by geographical, ethnographical, economic and cultural factors alone, even though working all together. It was achieved by the enterprising policy of a high-minded dynasty. The dynasty itself was doomed to an early fall, and their work, in the hands of their successors, to a lasting disruption. Ultimately two nations were to arise instead of one. I am speaking of the Dukes of Burgundy, and of their successors the House of Austria, Kings of Spain. The nations to be born are those of Holland and of Belgium.

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Feudal dominion of the Middle Ages, in the Netherlands as elsewhere, tended by itself to the agglomeration of groups of fiefs and territories, less by conquest than by inheritance. Shortly after 1300 dynastic ties had already united Holland and Zeeland with Hainault, Flanders with Artois, Brabant with Limburg. The reigning dynasties, though largely infused with French and German blood, might still be called indigenous. It was reserved for a foreign dynasty to inherit them all. In 1363 King John the Good of France enfeoffed his younger son Philip with the duchy of Burgundy, as a reward for his valour displayed in the battle of Poitiers, in 1356, where he had stood with his father and had been taken prisoner with him. We need not discuss here whether it was wise or unwise, from a French point of view, to loosen such an important demesne as Burgundy from the crown, and allow a younger son to found a power of his own. The act of 1363 was meant to avoid dangerous combinations, but evoked the most dangerous of all: a new state outside France. Philip of Burgundy, by his marriage with the heiress of Flanders, Franche Comté, Artois, Nevers and Rethel soon had taken root in the Netherlands, and once established there did not loose an opportunity to provide for the extension of the Burgundian power. The memorable story of fine diplomacy, high-handed enterprise and good luck cannot be told here in details. After Flanders, the next in wealth and importance, Brabant, fell under Burgundian sway. A double marriage prepared the annexion of Holland, Zeeland and Hainault. Sigismund, the German Emperor, strove in vain to retain first Brabant, then Holland etc. for the Empire, and withhold them from the grasping hands of the Burgundian dukes.

As their power extended towards the North over non-French territories the relations of the dukes with the crown of France, whence they had sprung, became less friendly. The first Philip, who died in 1404, was still in the first place a French prince. Under his son, Jean Sans Peur, the long and bitter feud between the rival houses of Burgundy and Orleans began. When the last period of the Hundred Years War opened the dukes of Burgundy still held with their royal parents of France. Jean Sans Peur's brother Anthony, duke of Brabant, fell at Agincourt, fighting for France. But soon followed in 1419 the murder of Jean Sans Peur, in revenge of his crime against the duke of Orleans in 1407, and now the estrangement of Burgundy from France was complete: Philip the Good, in the Treaty of Troyes, 1420, allied himself with Henry V of England. For a period of fifteen years

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duke Philip the Good was waging war in France against his royal cousin the dauphin, afterwards Charles VII, and at the same time keeping up a hard struggle in Holland and Zeeland for the possession of those territories. His endeavours were crowned with success: about the time of his peace with France, at Arras, 1435, his conquest of the Low Countries had come to a temporary halt.

So a new state had arisen between France and the Empire, comprising valuable parts of both, and meaning a danger to both. This state as yet had neither geographical cohesion nor political unity. It had not even a name. Lorraine, a fief of the Empire, and the French province of Champagne, separated Burgundy proper, duchy and county, from the Northern half of the duke's demesnes. There was no centre and no capital. At Dijon in Burgundy, the dukes had their tombs, but Brussels was the town where they usually kept court and the real centre of their administration.

After peaceful and warlike conquest a second and more difficult task lay before the dukes: that of welding their different possessions together and building up a solid whole, united by a common patriotism and resting on a strong basis of uniform law. Would it have been possible to achieve this? History has not allowed the experiment to be fully carried out. The rashness and lack of insight of Charles the Bold was soon to destroy what the patience of his father Philip the Good had built.

I have just said these Burgundian Lands lacked even a common name. ‘Burgundy’ was the name of the dynasty; it might sometimes be applied to its possessions in general, but this did not generally obtain. ‘Low Countries’ or ‘Netherlands’ was as yet hardly a proper name and excluded Burgundy proper. To distinguish the Northern territories either from France or from Burgundy proper, the chancery used to call them ‘pays de par deça’, the lands over here, which well betrays how badly they stood in need of a name.

Now if there was not a common name for them, there was another ideal connection, namely a historical prototype. This large stretch of border lands between Germany and France, covering the broad frontier, where the secular struggle between those two countries was to go on for centuries to come, had they not at one time formed an independent Kingdom, that of Lothar, the grandson of Charlemagne? His name still clung to the duchy of Lorraine. It might seem as if the course of events was to prove the necessity of such a middle state between the two great contending nations.

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Burgundian diplomacy of the 15th century was quite alive to this recollection of historical independence. In 1447 the envoys of Philip the Good were to suggest to the Emperor a re-establishment of the kingdom of Lothar. Under his successor, Charles the Bold, there has been question of the Emperor raising him to the dignity of King of Burgundy and of Friesland, the Southern and the Northern part. But Charles the Bold perished in the attempt to conquer those provinces which were needed to unite the two separated halves of his dominions: Lorraine, Alsace, Champagne.

Immediately after his death in 1477 Louis XI of France recaptured the duchy of Burgundy, nucleus of the ducal possessions. Henceforth the illusion of a large middle state from the Alps and the Rhone to the North sea vanished.

But just now the Northern half of the ducal dominions proved how fruitful half a century of central power had already been in engendering a sentiment of common political interests. The Estates of the Netherlands united to claim from Charles's daughter, Mary of Burgundy, a national government. There was a strong anti-French feeling, even in the provinces of French speech, as Artois, Hainault, Namur. The Burgundian state, now severed from its outlying parts far away in France, survived the dynasty. The House of Austria inherited the lands by the marriage of Maximilian with Mary of Burgundy, whence sprung the line of Charles V and the Spanish Kings and German Emperors alike. But the Netherlands, now more and more called by this name, continued to represent the old heritage of Burgundy.

Consequently we see Charles V pursuing the Burgundian policy of his predecessors in rounding off his dominions in the Netherlands on behalf of his own house, notwithstanding the fact that as an Emperor he would have been obliged to maintain their appurtenance to the German Empire. One by one the Northeastern territories were added to the so-called Burgundian dominions: Friesland, Utrecht, Groningen, at last the important duchy of Guelders, in 1543. Shortly afterwards, in 1548, the Emperor himself confirmed the pact which constituted the Netherlands as a tenth or Burgundian circle of the Empire, thereby severing the feudal ties of Flanders and Artois with France, but at the same time reducing the connection of all the Netherlands with the Empire to a mere form.

So, in the middle of the 16th century there existed a State, comprising both Belgium and Holland of to-day, with some parts which

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afterwards fell to France. It was loosely connected with the so-called Franche Comté or County of Burgundy, which had been rescued from the catastrophe of 1477. This State was sometimes spoken of as the Seventeen Netherlands. The name implies that no strong unity had as yet been achieved. The complex consisted of a great number of particular duchies, counties and dominions, each having its own administration and judicature, and its own Estates. Central institutions, such as the Grand Court of Mechlin, or the occasionally convoked Estates General, were few and feeble. We may perhaps compare this state of things with the American Confederation before the framing of the Constitution of 1789.

The population of this Netherlandish State did not yet represent a nationality. There were strong sentiments of Burgundian loyalty, there was a vague feeling of a common fatherland, but on the whole Flemings, Brabantines, Hollanders, Frisians and the rest still felt as many different breeds, and had not yet forgotten their former enmities. Besides, there was the difference of language: Artois, Hainault, Namur and some parts of Flanders and Brabant spoke French, the dialects of the Eastern and Northern provinces differed from the official Dutch. Perhaps fortunate circumstances and a wise policy of the rulers might in the long run have overcome this lack of unity and gradually have blended all the provinces into a Burgundian-Netherlandish nation.

This name of Burgundy had migrated, so to say, towards the North: in sixteenth century English, we often find the word Burgundians to denote the inhabitants of the Low Countries.

But circumstances were not fortunate and the policy of the rulers was not very wise. Not 25 years after their definite constitution as a Burgundian circle, the great crisis had begun which ultimately resulted in the formation of two nations instead of one.

From the moment when Habsburg in 1477 had inherited the possessions of Burgundy, the Netherlands had become implicated in the stupendous growth of that house. Rulers of Austria and of a great many German territories, Emperors, then by unforeseen events Kings of Spain, lords of the New World and pretenders to large parts of Italy, Habsburg in the person of Charles V had won a position as near to universal monarchy as the world had known since Charlemagne. In this vast power the Netherlands were but an item, of much importance by their wealth and their situation, which now had become

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central instead of outlying, but far from dominating the Habsburg policy. They had to be subservient to the great aims of conquest in Italy, of authority in the Empire and of checking France. Their national interests were sacrificed to those of Spain and the Empire.

When Philip II succeeded his father in 1555, the evil consequences of this failing to acknowledge the right of the Netherlands to be governed according to their own interests, were already apparent. The political wishes of the nobles who at that time acted as the spokesmen of the country might be expressed by a modern word as a claim for home rule. The general discontent was dangerously complicated by the religious unrest. I cannot think of tracing here the series of events leading to king Philip's resolve of violent and military repression by sending the duke of Alva to the Netherlands, in 1567. We shall have to limit ourselves to envisage the position of the parties after the Dutch revolt of 1572 had begun.

The Belgian provinces of to-day: Flanders, Brabant and the rest, till then had been far more important than the Northern half of the Netherlands now forming this Kingdom of ours. The court resided at Brussels, learning was concentrated in the University of Louvain, commerce in Antwerp, which had superseded the older centres of Ghent and Bruges by this time. The nobility and prelacy alike centred in the South. The first act of the rising had been played at Brussels and Antwerp.

But now, with Alva residing at Brussels and curbing the land by his Spanish veterans, the Northern provinces profited by their geographical advantage of being outskirts, not easily accessible to regular troops by their natural defence, the water. The little towns of Holland and Zeeland revolted and held out against Spain, while Antwerp or Brussels could not even stir.

William of Orange was the first to realize that the only hope of success lay in the North, in Holland proper. He, the brilliant courtier of former days, did not shrink from locking himself up, for long and perilous years, in Delft and the Hague, there to take the lead of the desperate struggle. Here he founded, in 1575, in the darkest days of the strife, this University of Leyden, which is proud to call itself libertatis praesidium.

For some time however the hope was revived that Flanders and Brabant too might be recovered for freedom. A long and intricate diplomatic play began, wherein William of Orange exerted himself

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to the utmost to hold together the Seventeen Netherlands against the King of Spain. But in vain. In 1579 the French-speaking provinces of the South reverted to the obedience of Philip II. In the same year the other provinces, except a few, made the Union of Utrecht, to maintain their independence from Spain by mutual assistance. The fate of Flanders and Brabant remained in suspense for some years, till the fall of Antwerp in 1585 (a year after Prince William's death) decided that the border-line between the free Republic of the United Netherlands and the Spanish provinces was to run right across the Dutch-speaking territory, which had seemed about to form one compact national whole.

The exact frontier of the Dutch Republic was only established by the subsequent chances of a long continued war. The left bank of the lower Scheldt beneath Antwerp, originally a part of Flanders, remained Dutch from the beginning of the 17th century, so did the Northern part of Brabant after 1629, while Dutch power was thrust forward far into the enemy's land by the capture of Maastricht in 1632. The peace of 1648, which confirmed the entire dissolution of the formal ties of the Netherlands with the Empire, at the same time confirmed these fortunes of the war as the demarcation between the free and the Spanish Netherlands. It is the frontier between Holland and Belgium to-day.

From the first successes of the revolt against Spain we may speak of the United Netherlands as constituting a nation. We have seen how much political factors have contributed to welding them together, first by framing a dynastic union under the house of Burgundy, afterwards by uniting them by common determination of regaining their freedom, and of vindicating the form of religion that had become inseparable from the cause of freedom.

We have also seen, that this new formed nation ethnographically means a fragment of a larger whole. It had gained in ethnographical homogeneity by the dropping out of the French-speaking territories, but it had considerably lost in ethnographical strength by the separation from the most populous and hitherto most flourishing regions of Flanders and Brabant. However, this loss was not absolute. Ever since the revolt against Spain had begun, Flemings, Brabantines, and Walloons from Artois and Hainault too, kept crowding to the free provinces, to share their perils and their prosperity. I need not assure an audience of Americans that those who in times of oppression leave

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the old country to seek freedom elsewhere are not the worst. The emigrating Flemings and Brabantines did not find the task of building up an entirely new community here, such as the Pilgrim Fathers and the colonists of Virginia found in America. But they added invaluably to the skill and energy needed to harden the new Republic in holding out in its long struggle and in performing the glorious things that lay before it.

In the new Commonwealth the province of Holland together with Zeeland preponderated. Each province was governed by its States, which means Estates, composed of representatives of the towns and of the nobles, the clergy having dropped out as an Estate by the Reformation. Deputies of the provincial States formed the States General, the supreme body in the Republic. Sovereignty however was held to reside not in the States General but in the States Provincial, which means that the federative bond was loose; it often proved not stronger than the ‘rope of sand’ in the early days of the United States. The Stadtholder occupied a very peculiar position. Theoretically he received his commission from the several provincial States, but his office bore many traces of being in reality a remnant of the old monarchic sovereignty; stadtholder, that is lieutenant, meant the deputy-governor of the House of Burgundy-Austria, which once had ruled the whole. Since the abjuration of Philip II in 1581 the Stadtholder was a locum tenens taking the place of nobody. But he had another title of authority: the glory of the illustrious house of Orange, to which the Stadtholders belonged.

Now, though in the States General each province theoretically had an equal share of power, the province of Holland had the casting voice. Here the richest towns lay together, concentrating by far the largest part of trade and industry. Holland paid 58% of the costs of government of the Union. Just as Holland preponderated in the States General, so did Amsterdam in the States Provincial of Holland. After the fall of Antwerp in 1585 Amsterdam had rapidly risen to be the first centre of trade on the European continent. Now this double preponderance, of one province over six others, and of one city within that province, has largely determined the further development of national Dutch civilization. Holland and Amsterdam eradiated, so to say, over the whole area of the Republic. Happily, so many resisting forces were left in the other towns of Holland, and in the provinces outside Holland, that preponderance never resulted in

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domination. Amsterdam never played the part of Venice. Still Amsterdam and Holland became so much the true centre of national culture, that their type prevailed. - Dutch civilization bore the stamp of municipal aristocracy, middle-class manners, tastes and morals, and a strong propensity to commerce and the sea.

It is not surprising that other nations and their governments used to speak of the Republic simply as Holland.

The other provinces became assimilated to Holland. When the Union was formed, in 1579, the Northern and Eastern provinces still differed in dialect as well as in economic conditions. The official Dutch tongue of Holland proper soon imposed itself also there. Friesland and Groningen, Overijsel and Guelders might keep their social status of agricultural regions with a rural gentry holding the land, but this rural gentry itself received the best of its civilization from the municipal patricians of Holland. A stern protestantism of the Calvinistic type kept the ruling classes together and pervaded their culture. A prosperous minority of protestant dissidents has played a rôle not wholly unlike that of the Nonconformists in English history. Catholics remained numerous and enjoyed relative tranquillity, but the conquered territories in the South, with their almost exclusively catholic population, were not allowed to become provinces on the same footing with the original seven. Only after the end of the old Republic North Brabant and Limburg were raised to political and religious emancipation. Dutch national civilization never became so pronouncedly protestant as for instance Scotland or New England. Our greatest poet, Joost van den Vondel, in the middle of the 17th century, in later life became a catholic and though his later works breathe the spirit of his new faith in all its fervour and magnificence, he still could hold his place in the memory of Holland as the first poet of all.

A simple narrative of the facts leading up to the formation of the State of the United Netherlands, has thus explained, - at least I hope so -: first, how a new nation, unknown as such in the Middle Ages, was added to the nations of Europe, to play its part not without praise nor without some profit to the world at large.

Secondly, how this Dutch nation could not be born but by a violent crisis, which split in twain the ethnographical elements that seemed about to conglomerate into a larger national whole than the small

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State of the Seven Provinces, namely the Burgundian State of the Seventeen. - This larger unit was revived once more: in 1815, when the Congress of Vienna decided for the union of orphaned Belgium with Holland as a Kingdom under the House of Orange. - Strange irony of history: Orange after two centuries and a half ascending the throne left by Charles V in 1555, the ideal of William the Silent, of a national unity of all the Netherlands, fulfilled at last by the calculations of European diplomacy. They failed. The union was only to last for fifteen years. Belgium revolted in 1830, and after a long period of diplomatic action the exact frontier that formerly separated the Dutch Republic from the Spanish Netherlands was restored. So much had political cohesion of two centuries effected that, now that separation had become requisite, the old status could not be ignored. The modern Kingdom of the Netherlands, though consisting of eleven provinces instead of seven, corresponds almost exactly with the territory of the old Republic.

Are we to look at the separation of Netherland on one side and the Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium on the other, as the inevitable result of deep-lying differences of character, or as an unfortunate accident to be deplored? Some historical scholars here, of late years, have started a little controversy pro and con. I for myself incline to side with those who regard historical development with the eyes of determinism, rather searching the past to understand why things have come about so, than to prove (what theoretically always can be proved) that they might have come about otherwise too.

My narration, in the third place, tended to explain why the terminology concerning our State and our nation never became quite fixed. This country can be said to bear the name of Nederland. You are in the habit of making it plural: Netherlands. So do our coins and our official publications. If need be, Netherlands, Low Countries, Pays-Bas, may still be used when you mean to include Belgium, though this use is now almost limited to historical style. Most peoples of Europe are wont to call us Holland. We ourselves very often speak of our country as Holland, though we are quite aware that Holland in the proper sense means only two provinces of it. How it came about that the name of Holland was used to denote the United Provinces as a whole, I hope to have made clear.

So there are three different ways of calling our country: Nether-

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land in the singular, Netherlands in the plural and Holland.

The English-speaking nations have one more reason of confusion. Your adjective for our nation is Dutch. You call our language Dutch, in so far as you are aware there exists one. You speak of Dutch painting, Dutch pottery etc. Your English forefathers even contracted a bad habit of calling all sorts of things Dutch, which we would rather call......, well we ought to avoid calling another nation names altogether.

We do not speak of our language or customs as Dutch. The corresponding word ‘Duitsch’ nowadays, with us, means German. The Germans themselves, as you well know, call their country ‘Deutschland’, and their nation ‘Deutsch’. That is the reason why, as I am told, the common people in America often confound Holland and Germany altogether, because hearing the Germans calling themselves ‘Deutsch’ they confound them with those who were called Dutch from the beginning, namely the Hollanders.

Now if you have followed my exposition, you will remember that at one time all the Germanic-speaking territories of the Netherlands in their largest sense, except Flanders, were politically united with the German Empire and ethnographically not distinct from it, except by gradually increasing differences of dialect. Dutch in the Middle Ages meant all that was contained between Friesland and Austria, the Slavic border in Germany and the Alps. - As late as the 17th century a Hollander might call his language ‘Duytsch’, though by that time it had differentiated as well from the Low Dutch spoken in North Germany as from the High Dutch that became the civilized tongue of all the German states.

So, Dutch as a term for the Hollander or Netherlander, is in a way an anachronism. It reflects a unity which ceased to exist three centuries or more ago. Moreover it has got an unfavourable tinge which is hateful to us. It would not be a loss, if Americans and Great Britons could be brought to substitute Hollander or Netherlander for Dutchman, and even to adopt the adjectives Hollandish or Netherlandish instead of Dutch. It would help to avoid confusion and to make old misunderstandings and disparagement to be forgotten. If the vague and antiquated word Dutch got out of use, it would mean that the English speaking nations were beginning to see us such as we are to-day and such as we ourselves wish to be known, no longer in the caricature of an old fisherman smoking a pipe.

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My friend Professor Van Eysinga has just told you how we conceive our place among the nations. It is before all other things an independent place that we want to keep. And we feel equal to the task of maintaining our independence as a nation. I do not mean by arms, but by the weight of our national personality.

No other nation of Europe, by its geographical situation or by its history, has become so equally balanced in the midst of the three foremost nations of Western Europe: British, French and German. No other nation has been so open to cultural influences from three or more different sides. At all times Holland, while having often something to give to others herself, has eagerly taken in all that she could learn from her great neighbours. These lasting influences have engendered in the Dutch mind a faculty of understanding and appreciating foreign nations. I do not mean the fact that the average Hollander of some pretention to culture speaks more or less fluently English, French and German, and reads them rather easily. What I mean is that we seem to be able, in a higher degree than for instance Skandinavians or Belgians, to understand the spirit of Anglo-saxon, French and German civilization equally.

Now this aptitude to appreciate other nations is not an absolute advantage. It sometimes really threatens to weaken our own national feeling. And yet this very faculty is inseparable from our possession of a culture and a language of our own. If we spoke French as a large part of the Belgians, or German as the greater part of the Swiss, we could not avoid leaning culturally towards one of the great nations. Just because our nation is distinct from all that surround it, it is able to sample them all, without getting enslaved by their potent charm.

I do not know whether Americans can fully realize the necessity there is for Europe of preserving its division into many nations, and the fervent desire of all and any of these to maintain their specific national existence. I do not mean this politically so much as culturally. Perhaps the most essential difference between contemporary history of America and of Europe lies here.

It would be quite natural for you to say: why should not the European nations, after so many centuries of bitter strife, in the long run be merged into one vast unit? - Your own amazing history presents such a spectacle of national assimilation and absorption. A national nucleus of Englishmen, after having already assimilated various foreign elements (among whom we are proud to reckon our hardy forefathers

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of New Netherland), in one century and a half of freedom extended over a whole continent, all the time as long as space and work did not fail, receiving and absorbing all new-comers of whatever origin, and so giving to poor old divided Europe that splendid and enviable model of unity, your immense Commonwealth. This mighty unity of yours, politically spoken, is the hope of the world.

Still, political harmony and concord is not the one thing the world stands in need of. However indispensable to civilization peace and order may be, real civilization is not contained in them. They may even be a danger to it, should they be promoted by equalizing and levelling. What we envy you is your unity, not your uniformity. We Europeans feel too keenly that no nation, however prosperous or great, is fit to bear the burden of civilization alone. Each in his turn is called upon, in this wonderful world, to speak his word, and find a solution which just his particular spirit enabled him to express. Civilization is safeguarded by diversity. Even the smallest facets in the many-sided whole may sometimes catch the light and reflect it.