r the whole country
extends an immense network of canals, which serves both for the
irrigation of the land and as a means of communication. The cities, by
means of canals, communicate with the sea; canals run from town to town,
and from them to villages, which are themselves bound together by these
watery ways, and are connected even to the houses scattered over the
country; smaller canals surround the fields and orchards, pastures and
kitchen-gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge, and road-way;
every house is a little port. Ships, boats, rafts, move about in all
directions, as in other places carts and carriages. The canals are the
arteries of Holland, and the water her life-blood. But even setting
aside the canals, the draining of the lakes, and the defensive works, on
every side are seen the traces of marvelous undertakings. The soil,
which in other countries is a gift of nature, is in Holland a work of
men's hands. Holland draws the greater part of her wealth from commerce;
but before commerce comes the cultivation of the soil; and the soil had
to be created. There were sand-banks interspersed with layers of peat,
broad downs swept by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently
condemned to an eternal sterility. The first elements of manufacture,
iron and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests had
already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began; there was no
stone, there were no metals. Nature, says a Dutch poet, had refused all
her gifts to Holland; the Hollanders had to do everything in spite of
nature. They began by fertilizing the sand. In some places they formed a
productive soil with earth brought from a distance, as a garden is made;
they spread the siliceous dust of the downs over the too watery meadows;
they mixed with the sandy earth the remains of peat taken from the
bottoms; they extracted clay to lend fertility to the surface of their
lands; they labored to break up the downs with the plow: and thus in a
thousand ways, and continually fighting off the menacing waters, they
succeeded in bringing Holland to a state of cultivation not inferior to
that of more favored regions. That Holland, that sandy, marshy country
which the ancients considered all but uninhabitable, now sends out
yearly from her confines agricultural products to the value of a hundred
millions of francs, possesses about one million three hundred thousand
head of cattle, and in proportion to th