336 
LAND GAINED BY DIKING. 
landers are believed to have secured some coast and bay islands 
by ring dikes, and to have embanked some fresh water chan¬ 
nels, as early as the eighth or ninth century; but it does not 
appear that sea dikes, important enough to be noticed in histor¬ 
ical records, were constructed on the mainland before the thir¬ 
teenth century. The practice of draining inland accumulation 
of w’ater, 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.* 
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.f In very many 
instances, 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 painfully won from the ocean has been entirely lost; in 
others it has been recovered by repairing or rebuilding the 
dikes and pumping out the water. Besides this, the weight 
at distances to which, half a century ago, military reconnoissances hardly 
extended. Upon a partial view of the subject, the human race seems des¬ 
tined to become its own executioner—on the one hand, exhausting the ca¬ 
pacity of the earth to furnish sustenance to her taskmaster; on the other, 
compensating diminished production by inventing more efficient methods 
of exterminating the consumer. 
But war develops great civil virtues, and brings into action a degree 
and kind of physical energy which seldom fails to awaken a new intellect¬ 
ual life in a people that achieves great moral and political results through 
great heroism and endurance and perseverance. Domestic corruption has 
destroyed more nations than foreign invasion, and a people is rarely con¬ 
quered till it has deserved subjugation. 
* Staring, Voormaals en Thans , p. 150. 
t 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. 
