The Belgian Netherlands had access to the sea, but the inhabitants were merchants and manufacturers rather than sea-carriers. The wealth of the Indies poured into the country, but their land was not easily defended. The first Dutch centre of freedom was the outermost island of the Rhine estuary. They could and did flood their land so that they might drown their enemies and allow their flat-bottomed ships to approach beleaguered cities, and they speedily found they had command of the sea. Belgium had none of these advantages, and remained under the power of Spain, while the Dutch not only became a nation of traders, but for a time held the ocean power of the world.
Now the Spaniards made an essential mistake. Gold and silver and so-called precious stones in themselves are not wealth. By a convention they stand for so much energy, but they are not energy. There was no saving of energy to any land by the Spanish conquest of it, and that conquest brought little real wealth to Spain. The small territory of the Netherlands brought four times as much income to the Spanish coffers as all the lands of Mexico and Peru. In the one land, energy was saved and there was much to spare ; in the other, little was saved and there was none to spare.
The ocean power of the Spanish depended only on their gold ; the ocean power of the Dutch depended on the fact that they used their own energy to make more energy available, and more energy accumulated in their hands, so that a great part of the gold which the Spaniards obtained from the Indies eventually passed to Holland. Mere military conquest of a land brings about no saving in energy.
And not only did Spain conquer lands across the ocean, but for a time she even brought Portugal under her control and destroyed the power which, not so favourably situated as was Holland for trade with the rest of Europe, was yet accumulating energy by the trade in spices of which she had control. Holland seized the opportunity. By 1578 Holland, under the leadership of William the Silent, had thrown off all effective control by Spain. At enmity with Spain, recognizing no Papal bulls, the Dutch roved the seas and snatched from their enemy any lands with which trade was possible. These lands had been Portuguese for the most part, but now, Spanish or Portuguese, it made no difference to the Dutch. Before another half century was over Dutchmen had sailed all over the world. At the zenith of their power a few years later, they were supreme in the East Indies ; they had settle ments in Brazil and Guiana ; they had discovered and rounded Cape Horn, which they named after one of their own little fishing villages. They possessed trading
stations on the coast of Guinea ; they had settlements at Cape Town on the way to the Indies ; Mauritius (called after their own Prince Maurice) and Ceylon were theirs ; and they held the key to the entrance of North America at New Amsterdam. In addition they did the greater part of the European carrying-trade, and even had the carriage of goods between America and France and Spain. They had made themselves, as they said, the wagoners of the seas. Such ocean power as Portugal and Spain had possessed passed entirely from them, yet Spain still retained her conquests.
But for geographical reasons a lasting Dutch ocean power was as impossible as was a Spanish or Portuguese dominion. There was an advance in the saving of energy; products of far distant lands were made avail able more cheaply, but something more was necessary.
Any engine requires " packing " and protection ; the energy of the machine must be prevented as far as possible from dissipating itself without doing work, and adverse influences must be prevented from injuring it. To do this, energy must be expended in suitable ways, but the less energy thus expended the better. Now Holland is not naturally able to supply enough energy to protect herself. The Rhine Delta is too small; it cannot support a very great population. The number of men with a community of interest and sympathy must of necessity be small. The Spaniards were not really seamen ; the Dutch were seamen, and when the struggle was between these two, command of the ocean went to the nation of seamen ; but when there came a struggle between the Dutch and another nation of seamen other considerations arose.
Further, though the marshes and channels of the Delta were of great service—as the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Babylonia had been—in protecting the sailor state, though it was owing to them that Holland gained her independence of Spain and a century later kept it against France, yet the very fact that her borders required defence shows that a certain amount of her scanty man-power had to be set aside to guard these defences, and when she was attacked by both land and sea it is no wonder that she succumbed.