still and be drowned or to work for dear life at the pump and
keep the flood down until his jailer chose to relieve him. Now
it seems to me that, throughout Holland, nature has introduced
this little diversion on a grand scale. The Dutch have always
been forced to pump for their very existence and probably must
continue to do so to the end of time.

Every year millions of dollars are spent in repairing dikes and
regulating water levels. If these important duties were
neglected, the country would be uninhabitable. Already dreadful
consequences, as I have said, have followed the bursting of these
dikes. Hundreds of villages and towns have from time to time
been buried beneath the rush of waters, and nearly a million
persons have been destroyed. One of the most fearful inundations
ever known occurred in the autumn of the year 1570. Twenty-eight
terrible floods had before that time overwhelmed portions of
Holland, but this was the most terrible of all. The unhappy
country had long been suffering under Spanish tyranny; now, it
seemed, the crowning point was given to its troubles. When we
read Motley's history of the rise of the Dutch republic, we learn
to revere the brave people who have endured, suffered, and dared
so much.

Mr. Motley, in his thrilling account of the great inundation,
tells us how a long-continued and violent gale had been sweeping
the Atlantic waters into the North Sea, piling them against the
coasts of the Dutch provinces; how the dikes, taxed beyond their
strength, burst in all directions; how even the Hand-bos, a
bulwark formed of oaken piles, braced with iron, moored with
heavy anchors, and secured by gravel and granite, was snapped to