own's appearance, principally from an architectural
point of view, in the preceding pages, because architecture is so
essential in expressing a people's character and aspirations, we must now
give our attention to another condition instrumental in completing a
town's aspect, namely, the daily life which is animating it. We,
fast-living twentieth-century people, are apt to suppose that life some
centuries ago was moving steadily but slowly, that people were spared the
enervating excitements of our own days and that they consequently had a
much more quiet and regular existence. Contemporary documents prove that
this opinion is wrong, at least in so far as Amsterdam is concerned.
Already in 1618 the Venetian Antonio Donato wrote of Amsterdam that the
streets and public places were so thronged "that the scene looked like a
fair to end in one day"; and did not Descartes write in 1631, when he
resided in Amsterdam, that nobody noticed him because he was the only
non-tradesman in Amsterdam amidst a trading population, attentive to its
profits. This reveals the bustling of the great commercial centre. The
facts have nothing astonishing in them if we realise that Holland's
commercial ships numbered half of the world's trading-fleet and that
Amsterdam harboured most of them.(3) No wonder that, in such a town, life
was intense and that its strong pulsation was felt everywhere: in crowded
streets and quays, in numerous offices and warehouses, on the large
exchange, around the Public Weighing Houses, in the shops and
market-places, etc. The ease and self-contentment with which the Dutch
were so often reproached at the time of the French Revolution, were then
unknown; on the contrary all was enterprise, action, and movement. A
salutary freshness of spirit was favoured by the variety of people
crowding in this centre: the hospitality shown to people of various
religions, from the busy Jews, to the refugees of Antwerp and Flanders,
created a rivalry of interests, benefiting trade in general.

To this animation caused by commerce we must add the life brought into the
town's thoroughfares by the people's domestic and social existence, which
was in those days much more out-of-doors than it is now, just as there was
also a much less marked separation between the various classes: housewives
going to the markets, children playing in the streets, families reposing
in or before their open street-doors, people of the lower classes seeking