Their needs and genius made them merchants and colonists, then
manufacturers and producers; and between products and colonies
shipping is the inevitable link. So their sea power grew But if
England was drawn to the sea, Holland was driven to it; without the
sea England languished, but Holland died. In the height of her
greatness, when she was one of the chief factors in European politics,
a competent native authority estimated that the soil of Holland could
not support more than one eighth of her inhabitants. The manufactures
of the country were then numerous and important, but they had been
much later in their growth than the shipping interest. The poverty of
the soil and the exposed nature of the coast drove the Dutch first to
fishing. Then the discovery of the process of curing the fish gave
them material for export as well as home consumption, and so laid the
corner-stone of their wealth. Thus they had become traders at the time
that the Italian republics, under the pressure of Turkish power and
the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, were
beginning to decline, and they fell heirs to the great Italian trade
of the Levant. Further favored by their geographical position,
intermediate between the Baltic, France, and the Mediterranean, and at
the mouth of the German rivers, they quickly absorbed nearly all the
carrying-trade of Europe. The wheat and naval stores of the Baltic,
the trade of Spain with her colonies in the New World, the wines of
France, and the French coasting-trade were, little more than two
hundred years ago, transported in Dutch shipping Much of the
carrying-trade of England, even, was then done in Dutch bottoms. It
will not be pretended that all this prosperity proceeded only from the
poverty of Holland's natural resources. Something does not grow from
nothing. What is true, is, that by the necessitous condition of her
people they were driven to the sea, and were, from their mastery of
the shipping business and the size of their fleets, in a position to