Golden Age, November 9, 1932
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A JOURNAL OF FACT HOPE AND COURAGE
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in this issue
Th IE LAND BELOW THE SEA
AL WAYS SOMETHING NEW
ODE TO THE BANKER
HOW NATURE CURES
JE'DGMLNT OF THE HEATHEN
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every other
WEDNESDAY
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Vol. XIV - No. 343
November 9, 1932
CONTENTS
LABOR AND ECONOMICS
FINANCE—COMMERCE—TRANSPORTATION
Cooper's Cartoon of Uncle Sam 74 250,699 Railroad Employees
Discharged in Year
Rapid Increases in Taxes .... 75
Sequestrators in Philadelphia . . 76
Sixty-eight Tax-free Towns ... 77
Justice in Chicago
Satan's Crazy Old World .... 78
Slave Market in Los Angeles . . .79
Uncle Sam Cuts Employees’ Pay . 79
Cause of the Paradox
SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL
The Birthplace of Liberty—The
The Sardine Day Coach .... 74 Net Incomes of Class I Railroads . 76 2,389,862 Air Passengers Last Year 77 National City’s Anaconda Victims . 78 Rabbi Halpern Is Offended . . .78 St. Lawrence Seaway.....78
Power Trust Skeleton.....78
McFadden on Federal Reserve Banks 79 United States Steel Common . . .80 Common Sense in Wisconsin ... 80 To Keep the Ship Afloat .... 80 Why America Is Broke.....82
Mail Subsidies Cost Money ... 82 Ode to the Banker.....83
Land Below the Sea .... 67
Always Something New .... 75
Iowa Store Forgives Debtors . . .75
Edmonton, Alta., Goes Sane . . .75
Salaries of the Kings.....77
World’s Largest Radio Station . . 81
Where Uncle Sam’s Money Goes . 81
Deflation of the Bankers .... 82
Publicity as Curb to Crooks ... 82
Mayday at Carbondale
Teachers’ College
MANUFACTURING AND MINING
Orleans, Vt., Is Taxless
Immense Iron Deposits in Urals . 75
Painesville, Ohio, Well Managed . 76
Ontario’s Electric Rates .... 78
Man-Hours in Industry
No City Tax Levy in Ponca City . 80
POLITICAL—DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN
America’s Heroic Chief of Staff . 77
Stealing from Taxpayers in Texas . 79
The Republican Platform .... 80
Another Prison Murder in Georgia 80
SCIENCE AND INVENTION
Paper May Be Used Again . . . .75
HOME AND HEALTH
Sterilization in Germany .... 75
Non-Smokers Are Best Students . 76
How Nature Cures......91
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
Judgment of the Heathen ... 93
“Regularly Ordained’’ Jersey Cow 95
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(The Golden Age
Volume XIV Brooklyn, N. Y., Wednesday, November 9, 1932 Number 343
The Birthplace of Liberty—The Land Below the Sea
IT IS hard to intimidate a man that has lived all his life in a place where at almost any time the ocean is liable to come pouring in on top of him and destroy him and all the works of his hands. Soldiers become automatically and mechanically courageous. Their training makes them so. Thus it is with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, miscalled Holland.
The North sea is the most tempestuous body of water imaginable, outside of the waters about Cape Horn. And the Netherlands are in the North sea, and below its level. Look at a general map of Europe and you will notice that the “Netherlands” are, in effect, the delta of the Rhine, and that this delta projects out into the North sea, to the north and to the west.
The Netherlands are rich with soils brought down from the highlands of Europe; the country is rich with the commerce that traverses the Rhine; it is rich with the world trade that passes in and out of the North sea; and richest of all in the peace-loving, industrious, contented, liberty-loving “Dutchmen” that have made themselves a homeland beneath the waters.
In New York and Brooklyn we look up at the skyscrapers because they constitute our horizons. In the Netherlands the people look up from their polders or fields and see above them the masts of canal boats passing along the tops of embankments against the sky. On the other hand, passengers in the canal boats gaze down upon cattle in the meadows and people working in the fields sometimes forty feet below the bottoms of the craft in which they ride.
Since the sixteenth century the Dutch have drained more than ninety lakes the bottoms of which are far below the level of the North sea. The dikes are of great width, and not infrequently from forty to sixty feet high. The railroads of the country are often built on the tops of these dikes; so are some of the canals and many of the highways.
One Inundation After Another
There is record of a great inundation, in the sixth century, in what is now the province of Friesland, and since then there has been one great inundation every seven years. Toward the end of the thirteenth century the sea destroyed a fertile peninsula and swallowed up more than thirty villages.
In the same century an immense chasm opened in northern Holland, forming the great Zuider Zee, now being reclaimed. As the waters rushed in more than eighty thousand persons were drowned. In 1421 a tempest blew the waters of the Meuse over its banks, destroying seventy-two villages and drowning one hundred thousand inhabitants. Hundreds of villages and thousands upon thousands of men, women and children were overwhelmed when dikes burst in 1532, 1570, 1825, 1855 and many intervening dates.
The reason the Netherlands is a country of windmills is that it is a land of high winds where it is necessary that pumps be kept going constantly to lift the surplus waters out of the polders into the canals. The winds furnish cheap power, but steam pumps, because of their greater efficiency, are now being more widely used. Anyway, it is a case of pump, pump, pump or be drowned, and sometimes the drowning takes place in spite of all the pumping.
In some instances great lakes have been drained, not altogether because of desire for the fertile lands which lie beneath, but because in a land where so much is below the sea level it is dangerous to have at hand bodies of water which can be whipped up by the winds and do immense damage.
On November 29, 1836, the Haarlemmermeer, a lake of 42,205 acres, was whipped by a severe westerly storm until the water rose to more than three feet above the normal level and a district of 10,000 acres was inundated. A month later a storm from the east submerged another 19,000 acres. With that, the lake was diked, powerful steam pumps were erected at three different points, and after twelve years of incessant labor the lake disappeared and a peril that had always threatened Amsterdam and Leyden was removed. Moreover, seven square miles of fresh polders were added to the Netherlands area.
Drying Up the Zuider Zee
The drying up of the Zuider Zee is the greatest undertaking of its kind ever projected by man. Imagine trying to drain a lake of 1,350 square miles, a lake through which a great river flows, and a lake the mouth of which, where it opens into the North sea itself, is 19 miles wide.
The dikes for this tremendous project are built in two parts. The first work is the forming of a submerged dam rising from the sea-bed to the level of normal high water. It consists of mattresses of brush massed with sand and topped or faced with broken stones. The main body of the dike, the waterproof part, lies immediately behind the foregoing, and consists of sand on a foundation of brush and stones.
The thickness of the dikes at the bottom of the sea is not less than 336 feet, and the height above the average level of the sea is 24 feet, which is 12 feet above the highest tides anticipated. The dikes are wide enough to carry a double-track railway, a road for cyclists and pedestrians, and one for ordinary traffic.
A new outlet to the North sea will be made for the Yssel river, which now flows out through the Zuider Zee. This outlet will be by a canal with a depth of 49 feet and a width of 3,500 feet, cut straight from Amsterdam to the sea. On this canal will be the largest lock in the world, at Ijmuiden. This lock will be 1,312 feet long by 164 feet wide, able to accommodate the largest ships afloat or ever likely to be built.
The damming of the Zuider Zee will remove all the brackish waters from the interior of the Netherlands, of great benefit to the farming and dairy interests in times of drought. Waters for irrigation, or for the cattle, will always be in abundant supply.
At present two pumping stations are removing 4,500,000 tons of water a day from what was but recently a portion of the Zuider Zee. It is estimated that by 1959 the entire reclamation project will be completed and 867 square miles of new land added to the realm, capable of supporting an additional 3,000,000 people. The present population of the whole of the Netherlands is but 8,006,600.
A Tremendous Undertaking
One of the dams which is being built at the mouth of the Zuider Zee is 17*4 miles long and will cost $35,000,000. The entire expenditure on dikes and drainage is expected to be about $190,000,000, but the value of the fertile soil reclaimed will be at least $210,000,000, so the thrifty burghers will make money on their investment.
The present Zuider Zee, in its greatest length, is 80 miles; and in its greatest breadth, 45 miles. Only about two-thirds of it will be dried up; the remainder, which will be called Lake Yssel, will be a huge fresh water reservoir after 1935.
Experience has shown that it takes six or seven years for the rains to wash all the salt out of the polders and to make them worth their ultimate value of $450 an acre. The Dutch have had so much experience that something like a gold rush is bound to take place as each polder is thrown open for settlement.
The port of Hoorn (for which Cape Horn was named) will be left high and dry, as also the port of Edam, now famous for its Edam cheese, but in these days of automobiles it is no great hardship for a city to be several miles removed from salt water. Look at Los Angeles.
Before the plans were made, at least one thousand borings were completed. By careful study of the data these provide, it is assured that only 8% of the polders recovered will have sand instead of clay soil as their base. Some of these polders will be 24 feet below sea level.
At the northern end of the new Yssel lake, where the Zuider Zee formerly merged into the North sea, there will be two locks through which ships of 2,000 tons may pass, and 25 floodgates, each 40 feet wide, through which the excess of water can be sluiced at ebb into the sea.
The Netherlands Well Named
The Netherlands is well named. One-fourth of its farm lands are below the level of the sea, reclaimed and protected by 1,500 miles of dikes. If the interminable bulwarks of earth, granite and wood were not there to attest their industry and perseverance, it would hardly be believed that the hand of man could accomplish such a work.
The Netherlands has a north and west coast line on the North sea of 470 miles. Its great and
GOLDEN AGE
powerful neighbor on the east is Germany. Belgium is on the south. The greatest length is 196 miles, the width 120 miles; the land area, 12,582 square miles; average height above sea level is but 37 feet.
There are eleven provinces. The names of two of these are North Holland and South Holland, and as they are relatively large and powerful the name Holland is often improperly applied to the Netherlands. Residents of the other nine provinces do not relish this nomenclature. South Holland, with 1,600 people per square mile, is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Land hunger is a chronic trouble in the Netherlands, so much so that in 1927 the Dutch government aided fifty Dutch families to emigrate to France, voting a subvention of 10,000 florins for the purpose.
Not only has the Netherlands had to battle with the North sea, which is a sufficiently great antagonist, but the Rhine, Maas, Schelde, Yssel, Vecht and Hunse rivers have all needed attention. Some of these have had to be channeled and defended at their mouths against the tides; others have had to be bordered by dikes as powerful as those raised against the ocean; others have had to be turned from their courses; the wandering waters have been gathered together; the course of affluents has been regulated and the waters have been carefully divided, so that the enormous mass of liquid could be kept in equilibrium in storm and calm, and kept moving toward its ultimate destination.
During the World War all the fighting nations knew enough to keep away from the Netherlands. On one occasion the present queen told the kaiser his tallest soldiers were two feet too short to enter her country, meaning thereby that rather than submit to invasion dikes would be cut and invaders and their equipment would get what Pharaoh and his crowd got when they tried to cross the Red sea after the fleeing Israelites.
In the Days of the Frisians
A Frisian is a native of Friesland; and if you look on the map you will see that Friesland is the northernmost province of the Netherlands. It abuts on the North sea. In the days of the Frisians of long ago they had a king by the name of Radbod. When the Roman troops that drank communion wine from the skulls of their enemies came through this part of Europe they conquered Friesland and compelled old king Radbod to be “baptized” or be put to death. As he stepped into the baptismal font he demanded of the bishop, Wolf ran, where his ancestors were. Receiving the blunt reply that they were, in hell, with all the other heathen, the pagan warrior stepped grandly out of the font and said, “I will join them there.” Now the Dutch are like that. They want peace if they can have it with liberty, but if not they are willing to go to hell and take the consequences.
Always an intelligent and liberty-loving people, the Netherlanders resisted the Spanish Inquisition at the hands of Charles V with a stubbornness which made it immediately the battleground of Europe and a haven for the thinkers of every land. It is estimated that, in a vain effort to subdue these dwellers of the lowlands, 100,000 were burned, strangled, beheaded or buried alive; and the more there were slain, the more there were ready to take their places.
The son of Charles V, the infamous Philip II, was even more tyrannical than his father. Goaded to desperation, the stubborn and libertyloving Netherlanders gradually armed themselves, and rebellions occurred here and there, culminating in a stand at Alkmaar that for desperate and vicious fighting between armies that truly hated each other was probably never surpassed. The Spanish and the Dutch loathed the sight of each other.
The Stand at Alkmaar
The Spanish butcher, the duke of Alva, his sword dripping with the blood of thousands of peace-loving Protestants in every part of the Netherlands, moved upon Alkmaar with the expressed determination of slitting every throat in the city. The Dutch knew that he was coming, knew that no quarter would be shown, and if they did not give the Spanish cavaliers a warm reception, then no invaders need ever look for one.
Unmoved by the twelve hours’ cannonading, the Dutch waited till the hated Spanish Catholics actually assaulted the city walls. Thereupon the Dutch Protestants let loose upon their attackers boiling water, unslaked lime, molten lead, liquid pitch and scalding oil, and flung around the necks of the climbing soldiers blazing hoops freshly dipped in tar.
Call it the Reformation, or call it what you may, the assault on Alkmaar broke the spirit of the Spanish. Burdened with the superstitions of their devilish religion, they came to the con-elusion that the Devil himself was helping the Protestants, and the next day preferred to be shot down by their own officers rather than again face such terrible foes.
One could hardly say that the Thirty Years’ War was won that day, but it is undeniable that the influence of that fight continues to this day. The Spanish invaders were never the same after that, nor were the Dutch. Liberty-lovers crowded in, French Huguenots, German Calvinists, English Puritans, Spanish and Portuguese Jews, Flemings and Walloons, and brought with them a widespread diffusion of education and culture.
The Dutch republic has been an entity to be reckoned with from that time to this. The present government is really a republic with a hereditary president, a descendant of the William the Silent, or William of Orange, who played such a large part in the stand made by the Dutch against the duke of Alva.
William of Orange
What George Washington is in the history of the United States, William of Orange is in the history of the Netherlands, and of the so-called “Reformation”. His opposition to the Inquisition marked him for death by the Catholic tyrant Philip II, and after six attempts, by as many assassins, the deed was accomplished, but not till Spain’s sun was setting in the West.
William of Orange knew when to flee and when to stand, when to defend and when to attack. He seems to have been merciful and wise and courageous, and even the seizure of his eldest son by the sponsors of the Inquisition could not turn him aside from the path he believed to be right.
His memory is held in such esteem by the Dutch people that in 1922, after the Hohen-zollern scare was over, the Dutch constitution was so changed that no person not a direct descendant of William of Orange may ever sit upon the Dutch throne. He founded the University of Leyden, the country’s oldest seat of learning.
The present titular ruler, Queen Wilhelmina, seems to have some of the spirit of William of Orange. When a labor uprising seemed imminent a few years back, she drove in an open carriage, alone and unguarded, into the very centers of the discontented areas, bowing and smiling this way and that, and accomplishing her objective of restoring peace and order.
Not an Altogether Placid History
While the Netherlands must for ever occupy a place in the front ranks of the countries that have lived by the arts of peace, yet the path has been not altogether easy, and in the days of the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars, was a very difficult one.
During the Dutch war of independence the sovereignty of the Netherlands was twice offered to Queen Elizabeth of England, but was declined. However, the English have always felt that this generous offer entitled them to help themselves to anything Dutch that they happened to want, as witness the once Dutch but now British or American possessions of Ceylon, Cape Colony, New York, New Jersey and points north, south, east and west. What taking ways the British do have! They took the Dutch sea trade, too.
In the French Revolution the Netherlands, peace-loving and unwilling to fight against what claimed to be ‘Liberty, Fraternity, Equality’, allowed themselves to be captured without a fight, and paid dearly for it. Soon they found themselves tied to the French chariot wheels, financing Napoleon’s campaigns of murder, and obliged to furnish soldiers for his battlefields.
When the Dutch found they had been deceived by the false cry of ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’, and that they had for the time lost their liberties and their rights of self-government, they came to hate the French oppressors as badly as they had once hated the Spanish, and for much the same reasons.
The French proposed constitution after constitution. The Dutch settled down into opposition to everything French. They would not have anything to do with French governments or with anything French, even though they now found themselves ruled with severity by French rulers. Like William the Silent they bided their time, and when Napoleon’s reverses came they suddenly proclaimed their independence afresh and won out.
After the Napoleonic Wars
After the Napoleonic wars the Dutch found themselves bankrupt, for the French had borrowed all their money, first to finance this, that or the other project, then to pay dividends upon such loans, and then to pay dividends upon loans upon loans, and so on. The French have a wonderful capacity for borrowing and then letting somebody else carry the load.
The reestablished government of the Netherlands included what is now Belgium, but the Protestant Dutch under a descendant of William of Orange could not get along with the French Catholics of their neighbors to the south and it was inevitable that they should separate as they did in 1830.
The Roman Catholic church never forgives or forgets, in which respect it is like its founder and head, the Devil. The bishops of Belgium made so much trouble for William II that he put the boldest of them in jail. The Belgic section of the dual country immediately rebelled, Catholic France backed the rebellion, and the new country of Belgium resulted.
Entire liberty of worship and conscience is guaranteed in the Netherlands. State allowances are made to Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jansenists and Jews. Of Protestants there are 3,658,797; of Roman Catholics, 2,444,583; of Jews, 115,223.
Queen Wilhelmina became queen at 10 years of age, and used to punish her dolls by threatening to make queens of them so they would have nobody to play with. She has reigned for more than forty-one years, and pays close attention to the details of her work. She signs nothing she does not understand. Once a year she rides in a gilded coach, a present from the nation.
She is extremely fond of jewelry. Amsterdam is the center of the world’s diamond industry, and the queen, who is one of the world’s richest women, has an eye to business. She will not wear a dress made in Paris. She is the author of a tract on prayer, issued as a state paper.
Education in the Netherlands
During the Thirty Years’ War, Leyden and Amsterdam became the centers of the publishing and book-selling trades of the world. The devastation of Germany and the freedom of press of the Netherlands automatically led the writers and thinkers of the world to its acknowledged center of liberty.
Education is now obligatory for all persons between the ages of 6 and 13. There are more than 10,000 students in the universities, which is a large showing for so small a country. Recent tests showed that only seventeen one-hundredths of one percent of the people are unable to read.
The Netherlanders are cosmopolitan, learning three or four languages readily, and so situated between England, France and Germany that it is very much to their advantage to do so. The ability to speak Dutch is a linguistic achievement in itself. And, by the way, the word ‘‘Dutch” is a colloquialism for the German word Deutsch; the two languages are closely akin.
Grotius and Christian Huygens, two of the world’s most famous scholars, were Netherlanders. The microscope was the invention of a Dutchman, and so was the drink cocoa, which is used in every home. Rembrandt’s art is the standard of the world.
Dutch boys and girls are in bed by nine o’clock. Children less than eighteen can go nowhere. No theater or restaurant or picture show will admit them. The climate is cheerless, only forty days of sunshine a year, and the kids are glad to go to bed to get out of it. They being fed mostly on bread and milk, and spending long hours beneath the blankets, it is said there is not a thin boy or girl in Holland.
Thrift and Cleanliness
The Dutch have a mania for work. Their land, recovered from the bottom of the sea, is proof, and so is their language. In summer, when the cows are in the field, the stables are scrubbed spotless and muslin curtains are hung at the windows.
The reason wooden shoes are worn is that the fields and the skies are so seldom dry. Wooden shoes are very suitable for use in a muddy country. They keep the feet dry, and may be removed readily at the door. Wooden shoes range in price from 25c per pair for the smallest size up to 65c per pair for the largest, regardless of style or design.
The Netherlanders are deficient in imagination and spiritual aspirations. As a people they are of the earth, earthy. They do not write satire and do not commit suicide. If they lose their’ temper it is behind closed doors. A small nation, surrounded by large and turbulent ones, they detest war and use all their intelligence to avoid it. Silence is their greatest weapon. They sheltered the kaiser when everybody else wanted to murder him.
The country is a country of males. There are no tragic tales of love and passion. All that is said of the women is that they are the wives and mothers of the men. The diversions are books, pictures, music, flowers, furniture, ornaments, keepsakes, ease and creature comforts. Snobbishness is common; but so is kindness to children and animals. It is a country in which democracy and formalism go hand in hand. They enjoy, or think they enjoy, the ringing of carillons ; probably they think it, for it is not music.
Prosperity is widespread. The taxable property is valued at over $5,000,000,000. The number of guilder millionaires (guilders are worth 40c apiece) is over 1,000. At the moment of writing, there are labor troubles. The liner ‘■Rotterdam”, which had got as far as Plymouth on its trip from Rotterdam to New York, had to put back to Rotterdam because 400 of the crew refused to stoke the tires unless given an opportunity to visit their homes in between ocean trips. The captain did not wish them to go ashore, for fear they would join the seamen’s strike. Dutch-like, they resented his tyranny and struck anyway.
Little Farms and Many Flowers
With land at $450 an acre, little farms, intensively cultivated, are the rule. Ninety percent of the holdings are of less than 50 acres, and more than 50-percent are of less than 12 acres. In other words, out of 200,302 officially recognized farmers, 182,011 hold from 2i/2 to 50 acres each. There are great numbers whose holdings are less than the 2y2 acres which one must have in order to be counted as a Netherlands farmer.
The heads of livestock just about equal the number of acres given over to agriculture, including gardens, orchards and pastures, a little more than 5,000,000 in each case. There are 615,165 acres of well-cared-for forests. The sugar beet harvest is over 2,000,000 tons a year.
Holland cheeses are famous. Ever hear of Limberg? It is one of the provinces of the Netherlands. Ever hear of Edam, Gouda, Leyden or Cheddar cheeses? The Dutch make cheeses to suit the palate of everybody, and send their wares all over the world.
Market gardening is largely carried on; immense quantities of cauliflower, early potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and Brussels sprouts are eaten at home, and other immense quantities shipped out of the country. Nearly all of these market gardeners own their own little farms.
But it is in flower-raising that Holland excels. Its hothouses could supply the whole of Europe with all the flowers it could use. In summer, in the season, one may see a square mile of tulips in bloom at one time. The bulb fields are in carnival from February to August, from crocus time to late gladioli. As early as the eighteenth century, Haarlem florists had their foreign catalogs printed in English, French and German.
In the season, the city dwellers pour out by the thousands to see the flowers. Swarms of bicyclists and automobilists travel the highways garlanded with flowers. Tourist trains, drawn by tiny engines, puff up and down the flower-filled fields. The fields are always ‘too square’, and the furrows always ‘too straight’, to be as beautiful as they might be; but the Dutch are like that; they want things prim.
The Dutch are great for carnivals, pageants and fireworks, to which the flowers and the canals lend unusual interest. At festival time, bright baskets of flowers are hung suspended above the canals, and their reflections in the still waters beneath constitute a most beautiful sight by day and a still more beautiful one at night.
Industries and Transportation
The Netherlands is not a manufacturing country, yet Dutch pottery, bricks, tiles, and glassware, leather goods and refined sugar are considered the best of their kind. Shipbuilding and diamond cutting are largely carried on. There are 5,200 vessels engaged in fishing. The Russian government at one time, in 1928, placed orders for 500 passenger airplanes with the Fokker works at Amsterdam.
The windmills, used for centuries to keep the polders dry, are giving way to the more dependable steam pumps. It is estimated that since 1923 more than half the windmills of the country have been removed or demolished. A society for the preservation of the Dutch windmills has been formed; but no association of men to keep alive an uneconomic way of doing anything has ever succeeded, and if the steam pump is cheaper and better, then the windmill must go, landscape or no landscape.
The reason the windmill no longer suits is that it occasionally happens that after a great storm which has spilled much water into a polder there follows a long period of calm in which a windmill can do little or no pumping and the cattle ruin their pastures, cutting the soft soil to pieces with their sharp hoofs. The steam pump does the work quickly, before the ground has a chance to get thoroughly saturated.
As there are no hills, everybody in Holland rides a bicycle in the summer; and as the canals are always frozen over, everybody skates in the winter. There are 2,000 miles of canals, 1,500,000 bicycles, and 47,000 motor cycles. The merchant marine is composed of 544 steamships and 19 sailing vessels. Rotterdam is one of the busiest ports in the world, with Amsterdam receiving about one-fourth as great a tonnage.
Some of the Cities
The Hague (Dutch hagc, hedge), population 432,680, 15 miles northwest of Rotterdam, 33 miles southwest of Amsterdam, and 3 miles from the North sea, is the seat of the Court, the residence of the foreign ambassadors, and the site of the Andrew Carnegie $1,500,000 peace palace. The parks, gardens, markets and suburbs are famous for their beauty. The place, originally a hunting lodge, has been an abode of royalty for 700 years.
Amsterdam (formerly Amstelredam), the chief city, has a population of 749,459. Six hundred years ago it was the residence of the lords of Amstel, meaning that they bossed the fishing business at the point where the Amstel river flows into the Zuider Zee. The city was originally built on a peat bog. Today it consists of 90 islands, with all of its buildings resting securely on piles driven 14 to 60 feet through loose sand to the solid stratum of firm clay underneath. It is the diamond market of the world.
Rotterdam, population 582,507, has a tonnage of foreign and inland traffic surpassed only by London among European ports. It has many flourishing mills, iron works and shipbuilding yards.
Utrecht, on the Old Rhine, was old in the days of the Romans, and was called by them Traiect-um ad RJieninn, whence its name. It was here the Dutch provinces declared their independence of Spain. Its population, 153,208; it is an important railway center.
Haarlem, Leyden and Alkmaar are all important points near the west coast, all close to one another, and all reminiscent of the gallant fight the stubborn and peace-loving Dutch put up to stay the hand of the Spanish Inquisitors. The oldest printing office in Holland is located in Haarlem, for which our own New York Harlem is named. At Leyden, William of Orange relieved the besieged but resolute Dutch Protestants by breaking down the dikes and drowning their Spanish attackers. Later it was an asylum for the Puritans who sailed from there, to America. Of Alkmaar and its repulse of the flower of the Spanish cavaliers we have already written. Today it is the center of the North Holland cheese market.
As Governors and Administrators
As governors and administrators the Dutch have not been a stupendous success, nor a total failure. In their desperate war with Spain, not finally settled until 1648, they gradually grew strong on the sea, and but for the English would have ruled the waves to this day.
The first Dutch vessels to round the Cape of Good Hope easily displaced the Portuguese in the East Indies. Later they had Brazil in their hands, but incapacity to govern cost them the country. They lost New Amsterdam (New York) to the British (traded it for Dutch Guiana) and their possessions in Dutch Guiana have never been a success. In most of these instances a mistaken policy of dividing the lands up into huge estates instead of smaller individual holdings prevented a better record.
The Netherlands has universal suffrage for both sexes over twenty-five years of age, and compulsory voting. There are at least seven political parties, with unemployment insurance in force, and not many unemployed, considering the difficult world-wide conditions now prevailing. Since 1921 a workman whose helpless condition requires continuous nursing and attendance continues to receive full wages from a State insurance bank specially created for the purpose.
In six of the principal cities there is a special body of children’s police. Their duties comprise supervision of children’s street trading and begging, investigation of home conditions, truancy and child delinquencies.
The Dutch East Indies
How it conies about that the British Government, when it was taking New Amsterdam, Ceylon and South Africa from the Dutch, and everything else from anybody that had anything, did not reach out the British paw and take the Dutch East Indies is something we could never understand. We feel sure no compunctions of honesty or conscience have ever interfered with any of its moves toward colonial expansion. Maybe it just concluded that the time was not yet ripe, and the Dutch might as well govern temporarily, until the British got ready to take everything over.
The Dutch East Indies have half the population of the United States and an area half the size of non-Russian Europe. Java alone is four times the area of the Netherlands, and has five times as great a population. Sumatra covers an area as large as the state of California; Dutch Borneo is as large as France.
Java is the most densely populated land mass in the world, with 821 people to the square mile. The island is of enormous natural and annually productive wealth, producing for export vast quantities of sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa, indigo, spices, cinchona, rubber, copra, tin, petroleum and coal. How did the British ever come to overlook all this?
In the fiscal year ended June 30, 1914, imports into the United States from the Dutch East Indies were $5,334,000. Seven years later these imports from the same islands were $141, 064,000.
The abundance of raw materials has encouraged manufacturing, which now includes iron products, vegetable oils, building materials, rope, bristles, paint, chemicals, etc. The Dutch East Indies are considered the most valuable possessions in the Pacific.
By one means or another 170,000 of the Dutch have been able to retain control of the 60,000,000 Mohammedan natives. Sometimes the unarmed people have been mowed down with machine guns. There have been bad housing, prohibition of meetings and associations, and censorship of the press; but things are better now and the Javanese are more kindly treated.
In recent years it has become the custom of the Hollanders to refer to the Javanese as ‘our brown brother’ and to invite his cooperation in various activities and walks of life. Possibly that is done merely for policy’s sake, as the Netherlands has no navy to enforce its demands in case of a great uprising, but, even if that, it is good policy. Why practice cruelty and oppression, as has been done in India, when even the ends of Simon-pure selfishness are better served by kindness and consideration of somebody besides the lordly whites?
Cooper’s Cartoon of Uncle Sam
IN A RECENT number of Collier’s magazine the cartoonist F. G. Cooper has a picture of Uncle Sam wearing black goggles and a huge sign on his shirt front entitled “Pity the Blind”. In his extended hand he has a tin cup. In his hat, which lies on the ground, he has papers reading: “Billions for luxuries; Savings Bank deposits increase since 1929 $1,233,000,000; Total bank savings $29,000,000,000, and Record home ownership.” Out of his pockets he had securities reading: “Funds for travel; Funds for schooling; 5 mechanical horsepower per worker; 40% more stock owners since 1929; Gold stock $4,370,000,000, Britain $588,000,000; Treasury issue nine times oversubscribed; Life insurance $109,000,000,000; Billion-dollar weekly income; Movie attendance 75,000,000 weekly.” It seems quite convincing, but the next clipping we pick up is one from the New York WorldTelegram which tells us that right here in our own city of New York we have 900,000 persons out of work, more than 600,000 of whom are now receiving some kind of help from the city or from organizations; and that seems convincing on the other side. The most that could be said for Mr. Cooper’s cartoon is that it shows our civilization here is most pitifully lopsided.
Suppose we had in America ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the wealth in the world, and that wealth were all in the hands of one man. Would that make America the happiest land in the world?
The Sardine Day Coach
CPHE Pennsylvania Railroad has constructed -L one day coach which we hope will be the last one, wherein comfort will disappear and 120 passengers will be jammed into the space hitherto reserved for 76. This is done by arranging the seats on two levels, one of them a step down from the aisle and the other two steps up.
As persons parade the aisles they can conveniently kick any loose rubbish into the laps of passengers in the bottom row. Those in the top row do not sit exactly in the laps of those in the bottom row; not exactly, but almost. Advantage is taken of the fact that when persons are seated there is normally a little vacant space above their knees. In the sardine type of coach this extra space will be utilized for another row of passengers.
Always Something New
Education in South Carolina Edmonton, Alberta, Goes Sane
NEGROES constitute one-half of the popula- T^DMONTON, Alberta, Canada, has gone tion of South Carolina, but receive only J—sane. It has decided to abolish cadet train-one-tenth of the total appropriation for educa- ing in the schools. We need some of that kind tion. of sanity in various parts of the United States.
An Iowa Store Forgives Its Debtors
Me. and Mrs. James Hennum, of Sloan, Iowa, operating a general store, recently forgave all their debtors, a total of about $75,000. The debts ranged from a few cents to $1,000, and some of them had been owed for fourteen years.
Orleans, Vermont, Is Taxless
ORLEANS, Vermont, is the only taxless community in New England. This situation is due to the fact that it has a surplus piled up from the profitable operation of its own water and electric light and power plants.
Paper May Be Used Again
BY A NEW device ink can be removed from printed matter and the paper can be used again. It is estimated that by this new arrangement the cost of w-hite paper can be reduced at least 50 percent.
Frightening Crows Away from Watermelons
CROWS are fond of watermelons; they destroy many by pecking large holes in them. It has been discovered that they can be frightened away by placing a small stone on top of each ripening melon.
Immense Deposits of iron in the Urals
THE Russians have discovered in the Urals, less than seventy miles from a railway, an iron-ore deposit estimated at 600,000,000 tons, of which about one-third is near the surface. It contains an iron content of 40 percent to 60 percent, and may change the whole Russian metallurgical situation.
Sterilization in Germany
Sir Bernard Mallet, of London, advocate of sterilization of the unfit, is quoted as authority for the statement that in Germany there are at least 100,000 women sterilized every year. Let us hope that after a little w’hile the sterilizers will get around to Sir Bernard Mallet, or possibly they have already done it and that accounts for his interest in the subject.
250,699 Railroad Employees Discharged in Year THE shrinkage of business in the United
States is reflected in the discharge of 250,699 railroad employees in one year. In some instances these men have been in the employ of the roads for which they work for twenty years.
One Million Fewer Automobiles
HERE are one million fewer automobiles in operation this year than there were a year-ago, which means that one million more American families are deprived of what was to most of them their greatest means of enjoyment.
Rapid Increases in Taxes
IN THE sixteen years from 1913 to 1929 the combined expenditures of federal, state and local governments increased 347 percent; in other words, expenditures for government increased more than twice as fast as income, and more than ten times as fast as population.
Automobiles in Venice
VENICE, with its 261,000 people, has but 408 automobiles, and they are kept on the mainland, two miles away. A bridge is now being built that will connect the city with the mainland, and the city will have just one garage, with capacity for 1,000 cars.
Music in London Mines
IN AT least one mine in South Yorkshire, England, the miners hew7 coal to the strains of music which come to them by radio at the working face. It is believed that these radio installations can be used to good advantage in the case of mine disasters.
Very Few Murderers Suffer Penalty
IN THE United States the ratio of convictions in prosecutions for murder is less than seventeen percent, and not more than two percent of the murderers ever reach the death chamber. Over ten thousand murders are committed every year.
Net Incomes of Class 1 Railroads
IN JUNE, 1931, the net operating income of the Class I railroads was $50,162,000. This last June it was $14,000,000. This leaves them with 27.9 percent of the net income they had a year earlier, but look at all the “rugged individualism'5 they have.
Farm Boys Study Gas Engines
A FARM boys’ club near Gibbon, Nebr., has adopted the farm gas engine for study and experiment. The work has proved highly practical, as the club members have learned to repair gas engines, tractors, trucks and automobiles on their home farms.
Non-Smokers Are the Best Students
OF 113 students studied at Washington State
College 60 were smokers; their standings averaged 80.82%. The 53 that were non-smokers had grades averaging 86.45%. In intelligence tests the smokers attained a grade of 5.9% and the non-smokers a grade of 7%.
Destitute Women in New York
THE Salvation Army reports a great change in the type of those seeking shelter. Now they are mostly women who formerly had large incomes, school-teachers, college graduates, highly trained office workers and girls who formerly had every luxury.
Sequestrators in Philadelphia
T) HILADELPHIA has adopted the plan of J- appointing a sequestrator to collect rents from a property on which no taxes have been paid for ten years. This sequestration of rents prevents the recourse to sheriff's sales, and insures monthly payments on the taxes as long as the house is occupied.
Ontario Nearly as Bad as Florida
Z^ANTARIO has not fallen as low as Florida in its treatment of prisoners, and certainly not as low as Nassau county, New York, but it is bad enough. At Grimsby twenty-three men who were out of work (a terrible offense) were jammed into two cells where by close jamming there was just room for them to sit down but not to sleep. After a night of this ‘hospitality’ they were turned out in the rain, in lots of three, at three-minute intervals.
Tax Sales in Chicago
AT THE close of July only half of the. 1930 taxes of property in Chicago had been paid, whereupon a court order issued for the sale for taxes of all the rest of the property in the city, 600,000 parcels out of a total of 1,300,000 that go to make up the second greatest city in the Western world.
Many Bondholders Have a Headache
TV/T ANY bondholders have a headache because in four months of the year $1,864,000,000 in bonds defaulted on their interest. Of these, $354,000,000 were railroad bonds, $473,000,000 were public utilities, $489,000,000 were industrial, and $548,000,000 were real estate mortgages.
Rockefeller City a Free Port
ROCKEFELLER CITY, in the heart of New York, will be a free port for the merchandise of all nations, similar to Hamburg, Copenhagen, Singapore and Hong Kong. Objects sent there for exhibition only can be admitted without duty, and only if sold for delivery in the United States will duty be collected.
Painesville, Ohio, Well Managed
PAINESVILLE, Ohio, is one of the well managed cities that is not sorry it has its own municipal electric lighting plants. Despite several rate reductions it has been piling up for itself a surplus of about $4,000 a month, and further rate reductions are in sight. The rates now are among the lowest in the state of Ohio.
Many Wringer Accidents
SO MANY accidents occur from the operation of power wringers in the home that it may almost be said they should not be permitted there. In the last three years eleven adults and seven children were killed in this manner, while some four thousand were injured, some very seriously.
Fighting Crime in New York City
A HUNDRED THOUSAND sizable posters encourage every honest New Yorker to phone police headquarters quickly if a crime is committed or if danger threatens. Policemen in automobiles will then close in on the suspected area, receiving detailed instructions by radio as they proceed.
Illiteracy in United States Decreasing
IN 1890 illiteracy in the United States was 13.3 percent; in 1900 it was 10.7 percent; in 1910 it was 7.7 percent; in 1920 it was 6 percent, and in 1930 it was 4.3 percent. In the urban population the proportion of illiteracy among those that are 10 to 14 years of age is only three-tenths of one percent.
Open-Air Library on Boston Common
OSTON has distinguished herself by opening on the Boston Common the first free and open-air library for the benefit of the unemployed. The library, which has 1,000 books contributed for the purpose, is housed in a band stand and requires that all books be returned the same day, at dusk.
“No Flowers; Remember the Flower Fund”
WEDEN has a custom whereby funeral notices often contain the words “No flowers;
remember the flower fund”. In such cases the money that would have gone for flowers goes to a fund which is used to provide for the less-well-to-do citizens’ homes more comforts than they would otherwise be able to enjoy.
America’s Heroic Chief of Staff
EFERRING to the way in which General Douglas MacArthur chased the veterans out of Washington, the Baltimore Sun describes him caustically: “That gentleman, who sent all the way to Fort Myer for a uniform, so that he could be properly garbed for a military operation which could have been carried out by a colonel and a few men armed with tear bombs, is unburdening himself of military romanticism undefiled, bare of the tiniest alloy of common sense.”
Dill Disgusted with Stock Exchange
Senator C. C. Dill, of Washington, is disgusted with the New York Stock Exchange. He says of it: “It is a gambling institution where insiders use marked cards and loaded dice. The story of what has happened there shocks every man and woman who has any sense of decency in business relationships. Every time we do anything in Congress to which the administration is opposed, stocks go down and we are told that it is because we did not follow the president’s leadership or did not do what they wanted in New York.”
2,389,862 Air Passengers Last Year
AST year in America there were 2,389,862 air passengers, of whom 522,345 were on the scheduled air lines. The average length of ride was only 90 miles, which seems rather surprising in view of the excellent service now provided for trips by air to any part of the continent.
Sixty-eight Tax-free Towns
IXTY-EIGHT towns in the United States have no local taxes, because of revenue from municipally owned utilities. These towns are Orleans, Vt., Skaneateles, N. Y., South River, N. J., Clinton, Mich., Spooner and New Glarus, Wis., Russell, Minn., Chanute and Colby, Kans., Torrington, Wyo., Waterville, Wash., and fiftyseven towns and cities in Oklahoma.
Salaries of the Kings
ing George receives a salary of about $1,700,000 a year; King Victor Emmanuel, of Italy, about $950,000 a year; King Gustave, of Sweden, about $150,000 a year; the president of France about $117,000 a year, which is $42,-000 more than that of the president of the United States. President Hoover recently cut his own salary by $15,000 a year.
A New Use for a Dentist
rpwO men in the Bronx inveigled a third man -L who owed them $50 to enter a dentist’s office on the promise that they would there help him get a job. Then with the help of still another man they held him while the dentist pulled two gold bridges out of his mouth. Looks as if we were coming to a time when people with gold bridges will have to learn to keep their mouths shut, or else learn to keep out of debt.
Demons Making Fools of the Hindus
OME of the ways in which the demons make fools of the Hindus is to get them to stand on their hands alone, with legs and feet curled up and resting on their wrists; to stand on the head and hands, either with the body vertical or at an angle; to stand on one foot with the rest of the body tied in a knot; and to lie on one side with one foot curled around the back of the neck. It is claimed that those who perform these God-dishonoring stunts receive the assistance of the devils that are all about us; and no doubt the claim is correct. But at what a price 1
National City’s Anaconda Victims
TpOR skinning them out of $158,000,000 the investors in Anaconda Copper stocks are thanking the National City Company, affiliate of the National City Bank. The stock which by skillful manipulation was boomed to $133 a share has dropped to $4.50 a share. The National City got rid of their large holdings and let their customers hold the bag.
Steamboats in Kansas City
STEAMBOATS drawing six feet of water can now ply between Kansas City and New Orleans, and are of about as much use to the American people as a line of carrier pigeons between here and the planet Neptune. The navigation of the Missouri has its proper place in popular song and joke books about the congressional pork barrel, and that is as far as it goes.
Fox Bit the Hands That Fed Him
William Fox, president of the Fox Theaters Corporation, is charged with the peculiarly small-souled act of taking part in a pool to sell short the shares of his own company and thus take advantage of every stockholder who had trusted him. He made $322,960 by the deal. Raskob and Chrysler were partners with him and share in his shame.
Justice in Chicago
CHICAGO cannot pay its bills. It owed James D. O'Reilly $850 in unpaid salary. O’Reilly had worked for the city for 25 years. O’Reilly owed the city of Chicago $34 in taxes, which he could not pay because the city did not pay him his salary. Thereupon the city auctioned his home off for the unpaid taxes. And thus endeth justice in Chicago.
Rabbi Halpern Is Offended
MENTIONING by name the Guggenheims, the Ryans, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Schwab and Raskob, Rabbi Halpern of St. Louis recently said: “Al Capone is an angel compared with this gang. He was from the underworld and we all knew it. We didn’t invest our savings with him. We turned to the financiers of our country for counsel, and they gave us a worse deal than the biggest gangster of the underworld could hope to give. If Al Capone should get ten years in prison, they should get life.”
St. Lawrence Seaway
(CONSTRUCTION of the St. Lawrence Sea-way will give the Great Lakes a channel 27 feet deep all the way to the ocean and will cost about a billion dollars. The job is expected to keep 20,000 men busy for seven years. Two million horsepower will be developed and divided equally between the United States and Canada.
Ontario’s Electrical Rates
TV/TORE than 86 percent of the domestic users of electricity in 721 municipalities of Ontario receive a rate of 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour, inclusive of all charges. Compare these rates with your electric bill with its theft or service charge, and its additional high rate per kilowatt hour, and you can realize why Canada today is proud of its hydroelectric system.
Power Trust Skeleton
THE Power Trust skeleton consists of ten top companies controlling ninety-one subsidiaries operating in 12,487 communities with a total population exceeding 42,000,000. The Federal Power Commission has recommended public control over the holding companies and supervision of all the contracts between them and the operating companies.
Racketeering in Dyeing Industry
ONE method by which racketeering is carried on in the cleaning and dyeing business was brought out when it was disclosed that three fires occurred in one establishment in one day because phosphorus had been placed between the seams in dresses sent in for cleaning. The object was to force the cleaner into joining the racket for higher prices.
Satan’s Crazy Old World
Clarence Darrow, famous criminal lawyer, recently said: “It’s a crazy old world. Think of it. The human race need work but an hour a day to supply its needs. There’s no real human labor left. Everything is being done by machinery. There's plenty of wealth, but a rotten distribution of it. There’s a tremendous surplus of food everywhere and yet people are going hungry for want of food. There’s no democracy left any more. Indeed, it is difficult to find a real democrat. It’s all a big bughouse. I’ll be glad to leave it.”
Man-Hours in Industry
Uncle Sam Cuts Pay of Employees
IN 1905 it required 1.75 man-hours to produce T T NCLE SAM has cut salaries of his workers a barrel of cement; in 1930 it required only 8.3 percent. Pay increases and promotions
.45 man-hour. In 1904 it required 1,291 manhours to build a car; in 1929, only 92 man-hours. In 1900 it required 70 man-hours to produce a ton of steel; in 1929 it required 13 man-hours. The maximum of employment was reached in 1918; since then it has declined.
Artificial Leg Business
A WASHINGTON manufacturer of artificial
legs employs forty-five salesmen. A condition of employment is that each applicant for work must have lost a leg. In the factories many of the workmen are also men that have lost their legs. The artificial legs are made of duraluminum, and since the World War more than 100,000 of them have been made.
Slave Market in Los Angeles
A LABOR slave market has been opened in
Los Angeles by Col. Louis Byrens, who conducted a similar auction years ago in Boston for returned soldiers, immediately after the World War. Eight persons were placed on the block, and their services sold to the highest bidders. One man who had been out of work four years obtained employment at 50c per hour.
Minister Will Teach Without Pay
IN A DISTRICT in Alabama where the people were so poor they could not afford both a church and a school, the minister and five other men and women in the community have volunteered their sendees as teachers. They will keep the school open and serve without pay. Here is a suggestion of what may be done with some of the surplus preachers no longer of any use as such.
Unemployment Wages Must Be Paid
Marriner S. Eccles, president of the First
National Bank of Ogden, says, “The depression will end when the unemployed are given jobs. If jobs are not available, unemployment wages must be paid, and I will not be in the least disturbed if such wages are called doles.” Eccles, with rare common sense, says that in ignoring the fact that the end of production is consumption, political and financial leaders are trying to apply a theory of economics as obsolete as the ark.
have been suspended. Husband or wife is discharged where both work for the government. Pay for overtime is stopped. No vacancies are to be filled. Workers reaching retirement age are forced to withdraw. Heads of departments are given authority to retire workers for indefinite periods.
Stealing from Taxpayers in Texas
NOW you would not think that in a highly religious commonwealth like Texas anybody would steal from the people as a whole, would you? But in the Dallas detention home the grand jury discovered that bread was charged at 60c a loaf, potatoes at $6 a bushel, green onions at 60c a bunch, and other foodstuffs to suit; and now you know why the Dallas taxpayers are sore.
An Impolite and Unfriendly Thief
CHINA has served notice upon Japan that if the latter recognizes the new state of Man-chukuo she will consider such action unfriendly. The next time some person meets you on a dark street late at night, knocks about half your teeth down your throat and then pokes a gun into your ribs and insists that you hand over your wallet, be sure to tell him just as he is leaving you that if he goes off with your wallet you will consider such action on his part unfriendly.
McFadden on the Federal Reserve Banks
T ouis A. McFadden, twenty years in the na" tional House of Representatives, and nominated for reelection by all political parties, recently handed the Federal Reserve banks the following diploma: “The depredations and iniquities of the Federal Reserve banks have cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted the government. It has done this through evasions of the law which officials countenanced and condoned and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.” Now isn’t that a nice way to talk about the private concern that has its name printed on most of our money?
The Republican Platform
qiHE WORLD TOMORROW, which is for
Norman Thomas for president, as the only possible choice of the three that are offered, says of the Republican platform: “No one expects political platforms to be models of sincerity. But we doubt whether any of them ever exceeded the Republican platform of 1932 in buncombe, evasion, duplicity, and insincerity. It is in a sense a perfect document: it is a symbol of the character of our political life.”
United States Steel Common
UNITED STATES Steel Common is almost back where it started, which is nothing. It will be remembered that when the Steel Trust was started bonds were issued to the full value of all the properties included in it. The common stock was so much pure blue sky. This blue sky, which had a paper value of $2,115,000,000 in 1929, was recently worth not quite $185,000,000. In other words 91.2 percent of the value had vanished into thin air.
Common Sense in Wisconsin
THE Public Service Commission of Wisconsin in a common-sense ruling has decided that the Wisconsin Telephone Company must reduce its rates 12^ percent of the increased purchasing value of the dollar. It has also decided, in view of the milking of operating companies by holding companies, that the seven major utility companies in the state must suspend dividend payments on common stock, pending an investigation.
First Fruits of Disarmament Conference
THE Disarmament Conference struggled manfully and womanfully at Geneva, for six months, to prove to one another that all armament is peace armament. They had hardly finished when Brazil showed that their arguments and conclusions were not in vain, and announced its determination to embark on a twelve-year peace program which includes twenty-five new vessels of what before the Disarmament Conference would have been called vessels of war, but now are called vessels of peace. Included among the twenty-five vessels of peace are two peace cruisers, eight peace torpedo destroyers and five peace submarines. These will be used to distribute sermons and hymns up and down the Brazilian coast.
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