The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  The rulers of the newly-founded State, being practical men of affairs, believed sincerely in the principle of live and let live, especially when it meant a profit to them. They therefore offered their hospitality and their protection to Jews and Huguenots, who in less fortunate countries were being persecuted for their beliefs, religious or otherwise. Most of these refugees (with the exception of a small group of obscure English dissenters, who however did not stay very long) became loyal subjects of the country that had given them the chance to start upon a new and happier career. As a rule their former masters had deprived them of all their liquid assets and had confiscated their savings. But they carried their old ability with them wherever they went, and they contributed most generously to the commercial and intellectual development of their adopted fatherland. And when the war of independence was over, a million people, living in little cities built on the bottom of some old lake or inland sea, boldly assumed the leadership of Europe and Asia and maintained that position for three generations.

  Then they invested their money—bought themselves large country estates, foreign pictures (which are of course always so much better than those painted by the talent at home), and spent their days being respectable. They did their best to make their neighbours forget where the money had come from, and very soon the money forgot to come too. For nothing in this world can afford to stand still, least of all our human energy. And those who won’t make an effort to hold what they have got will soon lose all, and that goes for ideas as well as for ducats.

  The end came during the beginning of the nineteenth century. Napoleon, who knew only as much geography as he needed to win his battles, claimed that since the Low Countries were merely a delta formed by three French rivers, the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt, the country belonged by right of geological descent to the empire of the French. A large N scrawled at the bottom of a piece of paper undid the work of three entire centuries. Holland became a vassal kingdom under a Bonaparte king.

  In 1815 however the country regained its independence and went back to work. The colonial heritage, sixty-two times as large as the mother country, has allowed towns like Amsterdam and Rotterdam to maintain themselves quite successfully as centres for the distribution of Indian products. Holland has never been an industrial country. It has no raw materials, except a little coal of very indifferent quality in the extreme south-east. It is therefore not able to provide its own colonies with more than six per cent. of all their imports. But the development of the tea and coffee and rubber and quinine plantations in Java and Sumatra and the Moluccas and Borneo and the Celebes demands vast amounts of capital. This fact is responsible for the leading position of the Amsterdam stock exchange, and the importance of Amsterdam as a place where people and nations go to borrow money, while the necessity of carrying all this merchandise to and from Europe makes it possible for the Netherlands to remain eighth on the list of ship-owning nations.

  The tonnage of the vessels used for the trade at home is higher than that of any other country. The country is honeycombed with convenient waterways, and the canal-boat is the most dangerous rival of the railway as it can be operated at a minimum of cost in a country where, until recently, the time element did not play a very important part in the daily affairs of men, women, cows, horses, and dogs.

  A great many of those canals are really drainage ditches, for one quarter of the kingdom’s territory is no land at all, in the usual sense of the word, but merely a piece of the bottom of the sea reclaimed from the fishes and the seals by endless labour and kept dry by artificial means and perpetual watchfulness. Since 1450 thousands of square miles of land have been added to the country by the draining of marshes and by turning lakes into ‘polders.’ To make such a polder is really very easy if you know how. First, you build a dike round the piece of water you have doomed to destruction and on the outside of that dike you dig a wide and deep canal, which is connected with the nearest river into which it can pour its daily surplus by means of a complicated system of locks. When that has been done, you construct a few dozen windmills on the top of that big dike and furnish them with a pumping machine. The wind or a small engine will then do the rest. When all the water has been pumped out of the lake and has been pumped into the canal, you dig a number of parallel ditches across your new polder and, provided you keep your pumping-mills and pumping-stations working, these canals will then take care of the necessary drainage.

  A POLDER

  Some of these polders are quite large and are inhabited by as many as twenty thousand people. If the Zuyder Zee ever gets dried up there will be room for at least a hundred thousand more. As fully one-quarter of the country consists of such polders, you will easily understand how it happens that the Dutch Department of Rivers, Canals, and Dikes disposes of more money every year than any of the other sub-divisions of the Government.

  LOCKS

  In strange contrast with the high fertility of this low part of the country, the higher regions of the east, where the central European plain met the sea before the formation of the big marshy delta of the Rhine and the Meuse and the Scheldt, is of very little use to anybody. For thousands of years it was an unloading station for the boulders and the pebbles of the northern European glaciers. In some ways the soil resembles that of New England, only it is much more sandy and it gives the statistics of the Kingdom of the Netherlands that queer twist which allows a country with a density of population of 625 per square mile (France has only 191, Russia 17) to carry a ballast of more than 25% of its total area as “territory which is essentially unproductive.” (In France the percentage is less than fifteen, and in Germany less than nine.)

  And this curiously sharp line of demarcation between east and west and fertile and infertile also accounts for the presence of the more important towns in a single small triangle right in the heart of the polder-land. Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, The Hague, Delft, and Rotterdam are so close to each other as to form practically one large city, and they all lie close to the protecting bulwark of those famous sand dunes, at the foot of which the Dutch of three centuries ago began to cultivate and to perfect the pretty little bulbs of a flower which their merchants had brought back from the Levant.

  This flower was called in Turkish a tulband. The word meant a turban, from a fancied resemblance between the flower and the headgear of a True Believer, and the Dutch changed it into tulp, whence the English tulip.

  Any wheezy old motor car will carry you from one end of Holland to the other in a few hours. And yet, if we except Attica, this narrow strip of land between the Rhine, the North Sea, and the Zuyder Zee has probably contributed more to the sum total of our arts and sciences than any other region of similar diminutive proportions. Athens was a barren rock, and Holland was a waterlogged swamp. But they had two things in common when they suddenly leaped into fame… an excellent geographic situation from the point of view of international commerce, and a superabundance of animal spirits and spiritual curiosity, left over from the days when they had been obliged to fight or perish. And out of these their glory was born.

  Chapter XXI

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  GREAT BRITAIN, AN ISLAND OFF THE DUTCH COAST WHICH IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HAPPINESS OF FULLY ONE-QUARTER OF THE HUMAN RACE

  Until a few years ago this chapter would have been entitled “Great Britain and Ireland.” Then man improved upon the handiwork of Nature and turned a geographical unit into two separate entities. And all the obedient scrivener can do is to follow suit and give each of the two countries a separate chapter. Any other course might lead to far-reaching complications, and I would hate to see the Irish Navy sail up the Hudson River to demand an apology for this “insufferable insult to the national pride of Saorstát Eireann.”

  Dinosaurs drew no maps, but the rocks remained behind to tell their story. And they are all there—the igneous rocks, volcanic products which got cooled off near the surface of the earth, and the granite, born under pressure, and the sedimentary rocks, slowly settling d
own along the bottoms of lakes and seas, and the metamorphic rocks, like slate and marble, which were really limestone and clay changed into more valuable materials by the subtle chemistry of the great depths.

  They are all there, lying about in disordered profusion, like the furniture in a house struck by a cyclone. They provide us with a geological laboratory of rare interest. They may account for the fact that England has given the world so many first-rate geologists. It may of course be the other way round: because there were a great many excellent geologists, we learned more about the geological formation of England than of any other country. But that hardly seems likely. Swimming champions are usually found near the water and rarely in the heart of the Kalahari Desert.

  And so the earth and rocks were there, and the geologists, the men whose calling it was to study the surface of the earth, were there; and what did they tell each other about the origin of the land of their birth?

  Try to forget the map of Europe as you have come to know it to-day. Imagine a world which has only recently emerged from below the surface of the sea, which is still rocking with the effort of creation. Picture to yourself vast continents rising high anti bleak above the waters, rent asunder by eruptions that crush the rocks as a manhole explosion will split the pavement of a street. Meanwhile the forces of Nature’s laboratory continue their patient labours. Incessantly the winds blow from the ocean, carrying billions of tons of moisture on their way from west to east, drenching the land and giving it moisture, covering it with a wide blanket of grass and ferns, arranging for the maintenance of shrubs and trees. Day and night, and night and day, and year after year, the tireless waves beat and pound and grind and file and crunch and rasp until the shores of the land wilt and crumble as the snow melts and crumbles before the rays of the insistent sun. And then suddenly the ice—the slow, merciless wall of death that groaningly hoists itself across the steepest side of the highest mountain-ranges, that rumbles ponderously down the slopes of wide valleys, that fills deep gorges and narrow ravines with frozen water and pieces of rock from the wasted hilltops.

  THE ATLANTIC, IRELAND, ENGLAND, AND EUROPE

  The sun shines—the rain rains—the ice cracks and creeps—the waves gnaw—the seasons follow each other, and when man at last makes his appearance this is what he finds. A long narrow strip of land, cut off from the rest of the world by a flooded valley which reaches all the way from the Arctic to the Bay of Biscay, another high plateau rising well above the waves and separated from the narrow strip by an unruly and choppy sea—a few lonely rocks sticking out well above the surface of the sea, a perching place for gulls rather than a habitat for man.

  That vaguely, very vaguely, was the way England came into being. Now let us look at the modern map and see what that shows us.

  From the Shetland Islands to Land’s End is the same distance as from Oslo in Norway to Prague in Bohemia. That means that Great Britain—i.e., England, Scotland and Wales together—with 45,000,000 people, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, is situated between the same degrees of latitude as the peninsula of Kamchatka (opposite Alaska) which also runs from about 50° lat. to 60° lat., and where less than 7000 people just about manage to keep themselves from starving by living on an exclusive diet of fish.

  On the east, England is bounded by the North Sea, which is really nothing but an old depression which has gradually filled with water. Again a single glimpse at the map will tell you more than a thousand words. To the south is France. Then we get something that looks like a trench across a road, the English Channel. Then the great central plain of England, with London in the south-east corner of it. Then the high mountains of Wales. Another depression, the Irish Sea, the great central Irish plain, the hills of Ireland, a few lonely rocks further towards the west, rearing their tops above the shallow sea. Finally the rock of St Kilda (now uninhabited), and then suddenly down we go, down, down, down, for there the real ocean begins and the last of the vast European and Asiatic continent, both submerged and semi-submerged, comes to an end.

  ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND

  As for the different seas and bays and channels that surround England, I had better mention them in some detail. I have done my best not to clutter this book with unnecessary names which you would forget as soon as you had turned to the next page. But here we are on classical ground for this strange little country has influenced the life of every man, woman, and child on the entire planet for at least four centuries. That, however, has not been entirely a matter of chance or racial superiority. That the English have made the best of their opportunities is undoubtedly true. But Nature had given them a tremendous advantage when she placed their lovely land on the flank of the greatest amount of territory in the eastern hemisphere. If you want to realize what that means, think of poor Australia, isolated amid an endless expanse of water, left entirely to its own devices, with no large neighbours, with no chance of getting new ideas from anywhere.

  Of course this happy position meant nothing so long as the Mediterranean was still the centre of civilization. Up to the end of the tenth century England was a slightly remote land, holding about the same position in men’s minds as Iceland does to-day.

  Three or four days of seasickness—that is what England meant to neighbours of the first-ten centuries of our era—and remember, a Roman galley was even less comfortable than a seven-hundred-ton steamer from Leith to Reykjavik.

  Gradually, however, the knowledge about these outskirts of civilization increased. The painted savages who lived in small round huts, sunk well into the ground and surrounded by a low earthen wall, were tamed by the Romans who, listening to their speech, came to the conclusion that they must belong to the same racial stock as the Celts of northern Gaul and who found them on the whole docile and willing to pay tribute without talking too much about their ‘rights.’ It was doubtful anyway whether they had any ‘rights’ to the soil they occupied, for it appeared almost certain that they were comparative newcomers and had taken the land away from an older race of invaders of whom the traces could be found here and there among the less accessible regions of the east and west.

  The Roman occupation of England lasted, roughly speaking, four centuries, almost as long as the time during which the white man has been the dominating race in America. Suddenly Rome recalled her foreign garrisons—all but a few regiments, which were left behind to guard the high wall which protected the plains of Britain from the invasions of the savages who dwelt among the impassable mountain-ranges of Scotland, and to keep watch over the boundaries of Wales.

  But presently the regular supply ships failed to come from across the water. That meant that Gaul had been lost to the enemy. From that moment the Romans in England were cut off from the mother country and connexions were never re-established. A little later news appeared from the coastal towns that foreign ships had been seen off the mouth of the Humber and the Thames, and that villages in Durham and York and Norfolk and Suffolk and Essex had been attacked and plundered. The Romans had not fortified the east coast because it had not been necessary. But now some mysterious pressure (whether hunger or wanderlust or an enemy in the rear we shall never know), which had pushed the advance-guard of the Teutons across the Danube and through the mountain passes of the Balkans and the Alps, was urging raiding parties of Saxon pirates from Denmark and Holstein to the shores of Britain.

  The Roman governors, the Roman garrisons, the Roman women and children who must have inhabited those charming villas of which we continue to find the remnants disappeared from view. They dissolved into space. Some of them were murdered by their own servants, and their women were married by kind-hearted natives—a strange fate for a proud race of conquerors, but one that has overtaken more than one group of ‘colonials’ who neglected to take the last ship home.

  Thereafter chaos—and groups of savage axe-men from Caledonia, industriously killing off their Celtic neighbours who had grown soft during the centuries when Rome had acted as the national a
nd international policeman. Then the usual mistake made under such distressing circumstances—the bright idea that invariably spells ultimate disaster: “Let us call in a few strong men from somewhere else and hire them to do our fighting for us.” The strong men came from the marshes and the plains between the Eider and the Elbe. They belonged to a tribe called the Saxons, which tells us nothing about their origin, for northern Germany was full of Saxons.

  Why they should have become associated with the Angles is another problem that will probably never be solved. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was invented centuries after they had made their first appearance upon the English scene. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is now a slogan: the ‘Anglo-Saxon blood’—the ‘Anglo-Saxon traditions.’ Well, one fairy story is as good as the next, and therefore if it makes people happy to think themselves superior to all other people, why not? But the historian must regretfully announce that the Angles as a racial unit are the little brothers of the Lost Tribes of Israel—they have often been mentioned in spurious chronicles of the past, but no one has been able with certainty to aver from whence they came. As for the Saxons, they were about on a par with the hordes of northern European emigrants to America one might have seen in the steerage of an ocean liner of thirty years ago. But they were strong. They worked and fought and played and plundered with equal zest. They were given five centuries in which to organize the land over which they now ruled, and during that period they were able to force their own tongue upon the poor Celtic natives, who rapidly lost all recollection of the few Latin words they had picked up while working in the kitchen of some noble Roman lady. Then they in turn were thrown out of house and home by still another wave of Teuton immigrants.

  In 1066 England became a Norman dependency, and for a third time the British Isles were forced to acknowledge a sovereign from over the seas. Soon, however, the tail was wagging the dog. The British colony proved to be a more profitable investment than the temporary motherland in France, and many Normans settled down in England for good.