Because Holland is so quiet, some rash critics fancy that she may be termed effete.  But this is far from the truth.  The absence of military burdens, rendered needless by the intelligent selfishness, if not the conscience, of the rest of Europe, implies no decadence of masculine spirit in the Dutch.  In no department of enterprise, commercial ability, or intellectual energy are they inferior to any of their contemporaries, or to their own great progenitors.  “Holland,” says Professor Thorold Rogers, “is the origin of scientific medicine and rational therapeutics.  From Holland came the first optical instruments, the best mathematicians, the most intelligent philosophers, as well as the boldest and most original thinkers.  Amsterdam and Rotterdam held the printing presses of Europe in the early days of the republic; the Elzevirs were the first publishers of cheap editions, and thereby aided in disseminating the new learning.  From Holland came the new agriculture, which has done so much for social life, horticulture and floriculture.  The Dutch taught modern Europe navigation.  They were the first to explore the unknown seas, and many an island and cape which their captains discovered has been renamed after some one who got his knowledge by their research, and appropriated the fruit of his predecessor’s labors.  They have been as much plundered in the world of letters as they have been in commerce and politics.  Holland taught the Western nations finance—­perhaps no great boon.  But they also taught commercial honor, the last and hardest lesson which nations learn.  They inculcated free trade, a lesson nearly as hard to learn, if not harder, since the conspiracy against private right is watchful, incessant, and, as some would make us believe, respectable.  They raised a constant and for a long time ineffectual protest against the barbarous custom of privateering, and the dangerous doctrine of contraband of war, a doctrine which, if carried out logically, would allow belligerents to interdict the trade of the world.  The Dutch are the real founders of what people call international law, or the rights of nations.  They made mistakes, but they made fewer than their neighbors made.  The benefits which they conferred were incomparably greater than the errors they committed.  There is nothing more striking than the fact that, after a brief and discreditable episode, the states were an asylum for the persecuted.  The Jews, who were condemned because they were thrifty, plundered because they were rich, and harassed because they clung tenaciously to their ancient faith and customs, found an asylum in Holland; and some of them perhaps, after they originated and adopted, with the pliability of their race, a Teutonic alias, have not been sufficiently grateful to the country which sheltered them.  The Jansenists, expelled from France, found a refuge in Utrecht, and more than a refuge, a recognition, when recognition was a dangerous offence.