sea. Another calls it "an immense surface of earth
floating on the water." Others speak of it as an annex of the old
continent, the China of Europe, the end of the earth and the beginning
of the ocean--a huge raft of mud and sand; and Philip II. called it
"the country nearest hell."

But on one point they were all agreed, and expressed themselves in the
same words: Holland is a conquest of man over the sea; it is an
artificial country; the Dutch made it; it exists because the Dutch
preserve it, and would disappear if they were to abandon it.

To understand these words we must picture to ourselves Holland as it
was when the first German tribes, wandering in search of a country,
came to inhabit it.

Holland was then almost uninhabitable. It was composed of lakes, vast
and stormy as seas, flowing into each other; marshes and morasses,
thickets and brushwood; of huge forests, overrun by herds of wild
horses; vast stretches of pines, oaks, and alder trees, in which,
tradition tells us, you could traverse leagues passing from trunk to
trunk without ever putting your foot to the ground. The deep bays
carried the northern storms into the very heart of the country. Once a
year certain provinces disappeared under the sea, becoming muddy
plains which were neither earth nor water, on which one could neither
walk nor sail. The large rivers, for lack of sufficient incline to
drain them into the sea, strayed here and there, as if uncertain which
road to take, and then fell asleep in vast pools amongst the
coast-sands. It was a dreary country, swept by strong winds, scourged
by continual rain, and enveloped in a perpetual fog, through which
nothing was heard save the moaning of the waves, the roaring of wild
beasts and the screeching of sea-fowl. The first people who had the
courage to pitch their tents in it were obliged to erect with their
own hands, hillocks of earth as a protection from the inundations of
the rivers and the invasions of the ocean, and they were obliged to
live on these heights like shipwrecked-men on lonely islands,
descending, when the waters withdrew, to seek nourishment by fishing,
hunting, and collecting the eggs which the sea-fowl had laid on the
sands. Caesar, when he passed by, gave the first name to this people.
The other Latin historians spoke with mingled pity and respect of
these intrepid barbarians who lived on "a floating country," exposed
to the inclemency of an unfeeling sky and to the fury of the