James Edwin Thorold Rogers

“ They raised a constant, and for a long time ineffectual, protest against the barbarous custom of privateering, and the dangerous doctrine of contraband in war, a doctrine which, if carried out logically, would allow belligerents to inderdict the trade of the world. The Dutch are the real founders of what people call international law, or the rights of nations. They made mistakes, but they made fewer than their neighbours made. The benefits which they conferred were incomparably greater than the errors which they committed. ”

“ But I do not find that in any department of enterprize, of commercial integrity, and of intellectual vigour, the Dutchman of to-day is behind any European nation whatever, or even the race which achieved so remarkable a position in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. ”

“ From Holland came the first optical instruments, the best mathematicians, the most intelligent philosophers, as well as the boldest and most original thinkers. Holland is the origin of scientific medicine and rational therapeutics. From Holland came the new agriculture, which has done so much for social life, horticulture, and, floriculture. The Dutch taught modern Europe navigation. ”

“ The language of the people is a dialect, spoken by the inhabitants of what is only a corner of Europe. But the Dutch are justly proud of their native poets, of Vondel and of Katz, for instance, from the former of whom, it is said, our Milton did not disdain to borrow, if we do not accept the alternative, that two persons of nearly the same age, not only thought alike, but expressed their thoughts in nearly the same words ”

“ They are fortunately disabled from wasting their substance on militarism, and they are, and I trust will be, protected by the public conscience of Europe, as they should be, in so far as political wisdom goes for anything, by the persistent goodwill of Great Britain. ”