PRIMITIVE CONDITION OF THE NETHERLANDS. 351 
live thousand citizens, and furnished a profitable investment 
for a capital of not less than £400,000 sterling or $2,000,000, 
which has been expended in improvements over and above the 
purchase money of the soil; and the greater part of this sum, 
as well as of the cost of drainage, has been paid as a compen¬ 
sation for labor. The excess of governmental expenditure over 
the receipts, if employed in constructing ships of war or fortifi¬ 
cations, would have added little to the military strength of the 
kingdom ; but the increase of territory, the multiplication of 
homes and firesides which the people have an interest in de¬ 
fending, and the augmentation of agricultural resources, con¬ 
stitute a stronger bulwark against foreign invasion than a ship 
of the line or a fortress armed with a hundred cannon. 
The bearing of the works I have noticed, and of others 
similar in character, upon the social and moral, as well as the 
purely economical interests of the people of the Netherlands, 
has induced me to describe them more in detail than the gen¬ 
eral purpose of this volume may be thought to justify ; but if 
we consider them simply from a geographical point of view, 
we shall find that they are possessed of no small importance as 
modifications of the natural condition of terrestrial surface. 
There is good reason to believe that before the establishment 
of a partially civilized race upon the territory now occupied 
by Dutch, Frisic, and Low German communities, the grounds 
not exposed to inundation were overgrown with dense woods, 
that the lowlands between these forests and the sea coasts were 
marshes, covered and partially solidified by a thick matting 
of peat plants and shrubs interspersed with trees, and that 
even the sand dunes of the shore were protected by a vege¬ 
table growth which, in a great measure, prevented the drifting 
and translocation of them. 
The present causes of river and coast erosion existed, in¬ 
deed, at the period in question ; but some of them must have 
acted with less intensity, there were strong natural safeguards 
against the influence of marine and fresli-water currents, and 
the conflicting tendencies had arrived at a condition of approx¬ 
imate equilibrium, which permitted but slow and gradual 
