DIKES OF THE NETHERLANDS. 395 



have embanked some fresh-water channels, as early as the eightli 

 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 tliirteenth century. The practice of 

 draining inland accumulations of water, whether fresh or salt, for 

 the purpose of bringing under cultivation 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 cmd Loss of Land m the Netherlands. 



The total amount of surface gained to the agriculture of the 

 Netherlands by diking out the sea and by draining shallow bays 



is alleged that, in general, not ten per cent, of the powder manufactured on 

 either side of the Atlantic is emploj'ed for military purposes. 



The blasting for the Mount Cenis tunnel consumed gunpowder enough to 

 fill more than 200,000,000 musket cartridges. 



It is a fact not creditable to the moral sense of modern civilization, that very 

 many of the most important improvements in machinery and the working of 

 metals have originated in the necessities of war, and that man's highest inge- 

 nuity has been shown, and many of his most remarkable triumphs over natural 

 forces achieved, in the contrivance of engines for the destruction of his fellow- 

 man. The military material employed by the first Napoleon has become, in 

 less than three generations, nearly as obsolete as the sling and stone of the 

 shepherd, and attack and defence now begin at distances to which, half a cen- 

 tury ago, military reconnoissances hardly extended. Upon a partial view of 

 the subject, the human race seems destined to become its own executioner — on 

 the one hand, exhausting the capacity of the earth to furnish sustenance to her 

 taskmaster ; on the other, compensating diminished production by inventing 

 more efficient methods of exterminating the consumer. At the present mo- 

 ment, at an epoch of universal peace, the whole civilized world, with the happy 

 exception of our own country, is devoting its utmost energies, applying the 

 highest exercise of inventive genius, to the production of new engines of war ; 

 and the consumption of iron and copper in the fabrication of arms and of 

 armed and armored vessels, has caused at least a temporary rise in the value 

 of those metals in Europe. 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 hero- 

 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. 



* Staring, Voormaals en Thans, p. 150. 



