To drain the lakes the Hollanders pressed the air into their service.  The lakes, the marshes, were surrounded by dikes, the dikes by canals; and an army of windmills, putting in motion force-pumps, turned the water into the canals, which carried it off to the rivers and the sea.  Thus vast tracts of land buried under the water saw the sun, and were transformed, as if by magic, into fertile fields, covered with villages, and intersected by canals and roads.  In the seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes were drained.  At the beginning of the present century, in North Holland alone, more than six thousand hectares (or fifteen thousand acres) were thus redeemed from the waters; in South Holland, before 1844, twenty-nine thousand hectares; in the whole of Holland, from 1500 to 1858, three hundred and fifty-five thousand hectares.  Substituting steam-mills for windmills, in thirty-nine months was completed the great undertaking of the draining of the lake of Haarlem, which measured forty-four kilometres in circumference, and forever threatened with its tempests the cities of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leyden.  And they are now meditating the prodigious work of drying up the Zuyder Zee, which embraces an area of more than seven hundred square kilometres.

The rivers, another eternal enemy, cost no less of labor and sacrifice.  Some, like the Rhine, which lost itself in the sands before reaching the sea, had to be channeled and defended at their mouths, against the tides, by formidable cataracts; others, like the Meuse, bordered by dikes as powerful as those that were raised against the ocean; others, turned from their course; the wandering waters gathered together; the course of the affluents regulated; the waters divided with rigorous measure in order to retain that enormous mass of liquid in equilibrium, where the slightest inequality might cost a province; and in this way all the rivers that formerly spread their devastating floods about the country were disciplined into channels and constrained to do service.

But the most tremendous struggle was the battle with the ocean.  Holland is in great part lower than the level of the sea; consequently, everywhere that the coast is not defended by sand banks it has to be protected by dikes.  If these interminable bulwarks of earth, granite, and wood were not there to attest the indomitable courage and perseverance of the Hollanders, it would not be believed that the hand of man could, even in many centuries, have accomplished such a work.  In Zealand alone the dikes extend to a distance of more than four hundred kilometres.  The western coast of the island of Walcheren is defended by a dike, in which it is computed that the expense of construction added to that of preservation, if it were put out at interest, would amount to a sum equal in value to that which the dike itself would be worth were it made of massive copper.  Around the city of Helder, at the northern extremity of North Holland,