The governments of the four nations owning parts of the Low Countries have done a great deal to help and encourage farmers. In Germany the government conducts many more agricultural experiment stations than we have in any part of the United States that is the size of Germany. • The Belgian Government sells tickets on the state railways at special low rates to encourage workmen in city factories to live in country villages where they can raise most of their own food on small farms and in gardens. In fact, the people who founded Garden City, England (Sec. 425), were trying to introduce into England the good method of using land and factories that had succeeded in Belgium.
444. A meeting place and a thoroughfare. —This lowland region is one of the great crossroads of world trade. Look at the map (Fig. 9) and see how many countries send their ships through the English Channel to France, Spain, and the Mediterranean, and to North and South America. Do you see also (Fig. 319) that the Rhine Valley lies open from the North Sea, a great trade route through South Germany to the very base of the Alps in Switzerland? Thus the mouth of the Rhine is a crossroad of travel and a cen ter of trade. Routes radiate from this center over both land and sea. We have seen another such gateway at the mouth of the Hudson. The Rhine Valley has been an important trade route for many centuries.
Because this region is a natural thorough fare and easy of access, many wars have been fought here in the past, and many battles of the World War were fought in Belgium and in the north of France.
445. Harbors and waterways by hard building deltas, the Rhine and other near by rivers have made much of the surface soil of the Low Countries. As the rivers fill up their beds, men must work to dig the mud from ship-channels and harbors. Big power-driven dredges take the mud from the channels and pile it along the river banks to make dikes. These mud dikes keep the rivers from overflowing the lowlands of Holland, Belgium, and Germany. All along the Rhine, from its mouth to Switzerland, an immense amount of work has been done to make the river a better waterway. Rocks have been blasted out of the river bed, and wing dams have been built to make the water deeper. Much labor has been spent to straighten the course of the river in Germany below Cologne.
Improvements of harbors and waterways still go on. Antwerp and Rotterdam are turning big meadows into docks where ships may load and unload. A tunnel wide enough for six vehicles is being built under the river Scheldt at Antwerp, so that the city may grow on both sides of the river.
Large canals connect the River Rhine with Antwerp and nearly all the Dutch towns. Canals extend from Antwerp to Ghent, Bruges, and other Belgian cities, and to Paris and other cities of northern France. In fact, canals run in all directions across the lowlands of Holland and Belgium. No other part of the world, except China, has so many of them. In some districts they replace roads, and one may see a farmer hauling hay in a canal boat from his field to his barn.
446. A gateway region.—The harbors of Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam are busy places. Like New York and the British ports, they are the gateways through which there flow streams of imports and streams of exports. Every day ocean steamers from other continents lie at the docks unloading goods into the long Rhine boats, or the short, stubby canal boats. As Belgium has a large colony in Central Africa (Fig. 531), Antwerp is the world market for ivory and other African goods. Four hundred years ago (Sec. 420) Antwerp was a greater entre p6t (Sec. 432) than London, and she still has a large entrep6t trade. Rotterdam (Fig. 362), the chief port of Holland, is a market for tobacco, coffee, cinchona bark, cinnamon, sugar, and other products from the Dutch East Indies. The heaviest trade of these ports is in grain and other foods, cotton, lumber, and other raw materials from the United States, South America, and all those countries that help to feed the millions of factory workers of Holland, Belgium, western Germany, Switzerland, and northern France. A wide region trades through these ports; goods from everywhere are assembled here. Much of the merchandise is carried by the Rhine boats, which go as far as Switzerland, and bring down the bales and boxes from hundreds of factories.
Many lines of British steamers call at Antwerp and Rotterdam, and help the Dutch, Belgian, and German lines carry the exports of this region to almost as many places as those to which Great Britain sends her exports.