The Holland Society of New York - Yearbook (New York, NY)

Page 212 text:

16o very children fought with the undying courage of their parents, were they not a true via dolorosa? That market-place at Haarlem, where, after a seven months' siege, the defenders were butchered, without respect to age or sex, is it not a golgotha, or place of skulls? The spirit of the Beggars of the Sea was well expressed in those defiant words, hurled from the battlements of Leyden to the remorseless foe: You call us rat-eaters and dog-eaters, and it is true. So long, then, as ye hear dog bark or cat mew, ye may know the city will hold out, and when all has perished but our- selves, be sure that we will each devour our left arms, retaining our right, to defend our Women, our religion, and our liberty. When the last hour has come, we will set fire to the city and perish, men, women, and children, in the flames, rather than suffer our homes to be dishonored and our liberties crushed. CG1'eat applausej That this boast was not an empty one was well shown by that old Dutch admiral, who, having fought against overwhelming odds for forty-eight hours, called his men about him when his ship was a dis- masted hulk, and, with their permission, applied the match to the powder magazine and blew them all into eternity rather than surrender to the foe. Mpplausej p s It is not my purpose, however, to recount this bead-roll of unclouded heroism. The world knows, or ought to know, it by heart. But I wish to call your attention to the fact that this heroism was that of an essentially, commercial and peaceful race. T For some centuries prior to the struggle for independence, Holland had been the most com- mercial, and therefore the most civilized, country 4

Page 211 text:

1,59 o Horace, as there were brave men before Agamem- non, similarly there were martyrs to liberty be- fore the M ayflower 'appeared in Massachusetts Bay, Holland's struggle of eighty years' dura- tion against the mightiest power of that time, un- questionably made possible modern democracy., It lit a train of human revolt, which has slowly and increasingly blasted a pathway of freedgm for humanity through the granite rocks of Caesar- ism and feudalism. To 'the masses of men in every part of the world, struggling to escape from the house of .bondage and into the promised land, it has ever been as la pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Cflpplausej This memora- ble valor speaks to' us to-night out of the past, reminding us, with an eloquence unattainable by mortal man, of our debt to the dead and our duty to the unborn. Alkmaar, Haarlem, and Leyden -4how, supremely glorious in the annals of history! Could their walls repeat the dreadful sounds and sights which they have witnessed, what a tale of immeasurable sorrow would they not tell!, Mar- tyrdom hallows, and wherever a man has con- sciously laid down his life for a country that he loved or a cause in which he believed, that spot must be forever sacred, for it is a true Calvary, .and there is again repeated the infinite tragedy of the Cross. CAppZcmse.j Thorvaldsen has imperish- ably chiselled both the pathos and the grandeur of this truth in his Dying Lion, at Luzerne: r the head, so expressive of ability, the infinite pathos of the eye, and the thought of fidelity in the paw which tightly presses the shield of the Bourbons- all attest, in imperishable rock, the same imperish- able truth. The streets of Alkmaar, where the

Page 213 text:

'I6I of the World. They Were the first manufacturing, agricultural, and commercial people, This was the more astounding because, apart ffom the poverty of their country's natural resources, they were obliged to create the very land upon which they lived. The immemorial folly of Canute, who had vainly told the Waves of the ocean to stand back, was With them an inspired reality, for at their sublime determination, the Waves of the all- conquering ocean did recede and left this little alluvial strip of territory, Which, like Palestine and little Greece, Was so memorable in the annals of human progress. Having thus ,conquered the sea, it was not unnatural that they early made it their obedient vassal. They became the best sailors and the greatest merchants of the World. Their manufactures of Wool, silk, linen, and lace were the first in Europe, and did much to lift the European peoples from their condition of squalor and poverty. Their sails Whitened every sea and brought drugs and spices from the East, Wines from France, furs from Russia, in exchange for which they gave not merely the products of the soil, but the Wonderful results of their artisan in- genuity. Their manufacturing enterprise can be measured by the fact that as early as 1340 there .Were in Ghent 4o,ooo Woollen Weavers, While a few years later the goldsmiths of Bruges were so numerous as to form an entire division of the na- tional army. In the ivvake of commerce followed art, learning, and science, and, best of all, those free institutions upon which the early coloniStS of America' built to such manifest advantage. Com- merce Was so much the very life-blood. Of the Dutch people, that even during their hfe-and-