, a measureless
raft of mud and sand; and Philip II. called it the country nearest to
hell.

But they all agreed upon one point, and all exprest it in the same
words:--Holland is a conquest made by man over the sea--it is an
artificial country--the Hollanders made it--it exists because the
Hollanders preserve it--it will vanish whenever the Hollanders shall
abandon it.

To comprehend this truth, we must imagine Holland as it was when first
inhabited by the first German tribes that wandered away in search of
a country. It was almost uninhabitable. There were vast tempestuous
lakes, like seas, touching one another; morass beside morass; one
tract covered with brushwood after another; immense forests of pines,
oaks, and alders, traversed by herds of wild horses; and so thick were
these forests that tradition says one could travel leagues passing
from tree to tree without ever putting foot to the ground. The deep
bays and gulfs carried into the heart of the country the fury of the
northern tempests. Some provinces disappeared once every year under
the waters of the sea, and were nothing but muddy tracts, neither land
nor water, where it was impossible either to walk or to sail. The
large rivers, without sufficient inclination to descend to the sea,
wandered here and there uncertain of their day, and slept in monstrous
pools and ponds among the sands of the coasts. It was a sinister
place, swept by furious winds, beaten by obstinate rains, veiled in a
perpetual fog, where nothing was heard but the roar of the sea, and
the voice of wild beasts and birds of the ocean.

Now, if we remember that such a region has become one of the most
fertile, wealthiest and best regulated of the countries of the world,
we shall understand the justice of the saying that Holland is a
conquest made by man. But, it must be added, the conquest goes on
forever.

To drain the lakes of the country the Hollanders prest the air into
their service. The lakes, the marshes, were surrounded by dikes,
the dikes by canals; and an army of windmills, putting in motion
force-pumps, turned the water into the canals, which carried it off
to the rivers and the sea. Thus vast tracts of land buried under the
water, saw the sun, and were transformed, as if by magic, into fertile
fields, covered with villages, and intersected by canals and roads. In
the seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes
were drained. At the beginning of the present c