y receive any impulse from the government; they
are spontaneous and voluntary, and are carried on by large and
powerful societies that have founded innumerable institutes--schools,
prizes, libraries, popular reunions--helping and anticipating the
government in the duty of public instruction,--whose branches extend
from the large cities to the humblest villages, embracing every
religious sect, every age, every profession, and every need; in short,
a beneficence which does not leave in Holland a poor person without a
roof or a workman without work. All writers who have studied Holland
agree in saying that there probably is not another state in Europe
where, in proportion to the population, a larger amount is given in
charity by the wealthy classes to those who are in want.

It must not, however, be imagined that the Dutch people have no
defects. They certainly have them, if one may consider as defects the
lack of those qualities which ought to be the splendor and nobility of
their virtues. In their firmness we might find some obstinacy, in
their honesty a certain sordidness; we might hold that their coldness
shows the absence of that spontaneity of feeling without which it
seems impossible that there can be affection, generosity, and true
greatness of soul. But the better one knows them, the more one
hesitates to pronounce these judgments, and the more one feels for
them a growing respect and sympathy on leaving Holland. Voltaire was
able to speak the famous words: "Adieu, canaux, canards, canaille;"
but when he had to judge Holland seriously, he remembered that he had
not found in its capital "an idle person, a poor, dissipated, or
insolent man," and that he had everywhere seen "industry and modesty."
Louis Napoleon proclaimed that in no other European country is there
found so much innate good sense, justice, and reason as there is in
Holland; Descartes gave the Hollanders the greatest praise a
philosopher can give to a people when he said that in no country does
one enjoy greater liberty than in Holland; Charles V. pronounced upon
them the highest eulogy possible to a sovereign when he said that they
were "excellent subjects, but the worst of slaves." An Englishman
wrote that the Dutch inspire an esteem that never becomes affection.
Perhaps he did not esteem them highly enough.

I do not conceal the fact that one of my reasons for liking them was
the discovery that Italy is much better known in Holland than I should