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three or four weeks and … I am very much pleased with Holland. It is a singular country. It is like no other. It is all the Effect of Industry, and the Work of Art.… This Nation is not known any where, not even by itsNeighbors. The Dutch Language is spoken by none but themselves. Therefore They converse with nobody and nobody converses with them. The English are a great nation, and they despize the Dutch because they are smaller. The French are a greater Nation still, and therefore they despize the Dutch because they are still smaller in comparison to them. But I doubt much whether there is any Nation of Europe more estimable than the Dutch, in Proportion.” Jealousy of the extraordinary Dutch ascendancy in commerce clouded the European view from a similar appreciation.
    As the primary ship-builders of Europe, the Dutch had added one more element of mastery in their lifelong contest with water. In prehistoric times when Europe was settled by Germanic tribes advancing from the East, one tribe called the Batavi, whom the Dutch in later centuries came to consider their ancestors, had pushed onward, seeking a secure area of their own, and kept going until they met the sea and could go no further. Here on the wave-flooded, water-soaked edge of Europe, having no other choice, they settled where the ground was too wet and life too difficult for any other group to wish to dispute the territory. By building mounds for the foundation of homes above water level and ramps to let their livestock enter and dikes to hold back the sea, by learning through practice and experiment to put windmills to work as pumps to drain the water eternally seeping from springs and streams and marshes, they put dry ground under their feet. Soon they were able to lift land from the bottom of lakes and swamps to create areas called “polders” for agriculture and habitation. By directing the drained water into ditches, they made canals for transportation. Maintenance of the drainage system required constant attendance and renewal; the work never stopped and was never finished. In a stupendous feat of labor and engineering, a nation succeeded in creating land for itself to live on, doing by the hand of man what only God had done before. If they could match the work of Genesis, they need fear no man nor element of nature and were infused by a sense of accomplishment. A people few in numbers on an insecure footing was enabled to launch a revolt against the rulership of Spain, the greatest empire of the day, and to persevere in a successful war of resistance lasting eighty years, from 1568 to 1648, against an enemy not as far removed as Britain was from the American Colonies, 3,000 miles and an ocean away, but on the same continent, an overland distance from Barcelona to Antwerp of about 900 miles. Eventually winning independence, the Dutch withinone generation of autonomy had transformed themselves into thegreatest trading nation in the world, holding the commercial center and financial heartbeat of Europe and resting on a seaborne empire that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Hudson River.
    The amazing growth and expansion of Holland was a phenomenon that causes historians to stutter and even caused wonderment to Dutch scholars. Like the draining of the country and the overthrow of the Spanish colossus, it may be a mystery only in the sense that the extreme exertions possible to the human spirit can never be wholly elucidated. Nevertheless, in the Dutch phenomenon some causes are discernible. Partly their rise grew from necessity—the need of a people on the edge of nowhere to find the means of livelihood and survival—and partly it came from the will and energy of a figurative little Napoleon moved to outdo his larger brothers, and partly from the impulse stemming from what they had already achieved.
    While the expansion was happening, it was no mystery to the Dutch themselves, who clearly explained what drove them in a petition addressed by the