centuries innumerable
others which would have been famous in other countries, but were
scarcely noticed in Holland--such as the inundation of the large Lake
of Haarlem caused by an invasion of the sea. Flourishing towns of the
Zuyder Zee Gulf disappeared under water; the islands of Zealand were
repeatedly covered by the sea and then again left dry; the villages on
the coast from Helder to the mouths of the Meuse were frequently
submerged and ruined; and in each of these inundations there was an
immense loss of life of both man and beast. It is clear that miracles
of courage, constancy, and industry must have been wrought by the
Dutch people, first in creating, and then in preserving, such a
country.

The enemy against which the Dutch had to defend their country was
threefold--the sea, the rivers, and the lakes. The Dutch drained the
lakes, drove back the sea, and imprisoned the rivers.

To drain the lakes they called the air to their aid. The lakes and
marshes were surrounded with dykes, the dykes with canals and an army
of windmills; these, putting the suction-pumps in motion, poured the
waters into the canals, which conducted them into the rivers and to
the sea. Thus vast areas of ground which were buried under water saw
the light, and were transformed, as if by enchantment, into fertile
plains covered with villages and traversed by roads and canals. In the
seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes were
emptied. In Northern Holland alone at the beginning of this century
more than six thousand hectares of land were delivered from the
waters, in Southern Holland, before 1844, twenty-nine thousand
hectares, and in the whole of Holland, from 1500 to 1858, three
hundred and fifty-five thousand hectares. By the use of steam pumps
instead of windmills, the great undertaking of draining the Lake of
Haarlem was completed in thirty-nine months. This lake, which
threatened the towns of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leyden with raging
storms, was forty-four kilometers in circumference. At present the
Hollanders are contemplating the prodigious enterprise of draining the
Gulf of the Zuyder Zee, which covers a space of more than seven
hundred square kilometers.

The rivers, another internal enemy of Holland, did not cost less
fatigue or fewer sacrifices. Some, like the Rhine, which loses itself
in the sand before reaching the ocean, had to be channelled and
protected from the tide at their mouths by immense lock