When Drusus a few years before the commencement of our era excavated the
Yssel canal, and thus gave a new arm to the Rhine, he began a process of
canalization in the Frisian and Batavian provinces which has been going on
more or less ever since. To the foreigner Holland or the Northern
Netherlands must always appear a land of dykes and canals, the one not
more important for protection than the other as an artery of
communication; spreading commerce and supporting national life. Napoleon,
with _naive_ comprehensiveness, called Holland the alluvion of French
rivers. Dutch patriots declare with legitimate pride, 'God gave us the
sea, but we made the shore,' and no one who has seen the artificial
barrier that guards the mainland from the Hook to the Texel will disparage
their achievement or scoff at their pretensions.

[Illustration: A Sea-Going Canal.]

The sea-dyke saves Holland from the Northern Ocean, sombre and grey in its
most genial mood, menacing and stormy for the long winter of our northern
hemisphere; but it is to the inland dykes that protect the low-lying
polders that Holland owes her prosperity and the sources of wealth which
have made her inhabitants a nation. The original character of the country,
a marshland intersected by the numerous channels of the Rhine and the
Meuse, rendered it imperative that the System of dykes should be
accompanied by a brother system of canals. The over-abundant waters had
not merely to be arrested, they had to be confined and led off into
prepared channels. In this manner also they were made to serve the
purposes of man. High-roads across swamps were either impracticable or too
costly; but canals furnished a sure and convenient means of transport and
communication.