LAND GAINED BY DIKING. 407 
believed to have secured some coast and bay islands by ring- 
dikes, and to have embanked some fresh-water channels, as 
early as the eighth or ninth century; but it does not appear that 
sea-dikes, important enough to be noticed in historical records, 
were constructed on the mainland before the thirteenth cen- 
tury. The practice of draining inland accumulations of water, 
whether fresh or salt, for the purpose of bringing under culti- 
vation the ground they cover, is of later origin, and is said not 
to have been adopted until after the middle of the fifteenth 
century.* 
Gain and Loss of Land in the Netherlands. 
The total amount of surface gained to the agriculture of the 
Netherlands by diking out the sea and by draining shallow bays 
and lakes, is estimated by Staring at three hundred and fifty- 
five thousand bunder or hectares, equal to eight hundred and 
seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty acres, which is 
one-tenth of the area of the kingdom.t In very many instan- 
ces the dikes have been partially, in some particularly exposed 
localities totally, destroyed by the violence of the sea, and the 
drained lands again flooded. In some cases the soil thus pain- 
gies, applying the highest exercise of inventive genius, to the production of 
new engines of war; and the late exiraordinary rise in the price of iron and 
copper is in great part due to the consumption of those metals in the fabrica- 
tion of arms and armed vessels. The simple substitution of sheet-copper for 
paper and other materials in the manufacture of cartridges has increased the 
market-price of copper by a large percentage on its former cost. 
But war develops great civil virtues, and brings into action a degree and 
kind of physical energy which seldom fails to awaken a new intellectual life 
in a people that achieves great moral and political results through great bero- 
ism and endurance and perseverance. Domestic corruption has destroyed 
more nations than foreign invasion, and a people is rarely conquered till it has 
deserved subjugation. 
* SrariIne, Voormaals en Thans, p. 150. 
+ Idem, p. 163. Much the largest proportion of the lands so reclaimed, 
though for the most part lying above low-water tidemark, are at a lower 
level than the Lincolnshire fens, and more subject to inundation from the 
irruptions of the sea. 
