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NETHERLANDS NETHERLANDS (LANGUAGE) 349 drown the country and its invaders. This ex- pedient was successful, and the baffled French were forced to retreat with great loss. Peace with England was concluded in 1674, and with France by the treaty of Nimeguen in 1678. The prince of Orange, who continued to hold supreme and almost absolute power in Holland, was married to the princess Mary, daughter of James II. of England, in 1677, and attained the throne of England by the revolution of 1688. During his life, and for several years after his death in 1702, Holland bore a conspicuous part in the wars waged by the European powers against France to check the ambitious designs of Louis XIV. On the death of William III. the anti-Orange party prevailed in Holland, and no stadtholder was appointed. The re- public was governed by the stat.es general, the grand pensionary, as the chief executive was styled, being till his death in 1720 the eminent statesman and diplomatist Heinsius. In 1747, the Orange party having regained the ascen- dancy, William IV. was made stadtholder of the republic ; and on his death in 1751 his infant son William V. succeeded to the office, which he held till 1795, when Holland was conquered by France, and the Batavian republic estab- lished. During the seven years' war, from 1756 to 1763, Holland remained neutral ; but in the progress of the American revolution she became involved in war with England, and her fleet sustained a severe defeat from the English on the Dogger bank in 1781, after a bloody fight. The French revolution found warm partisans in Holland among the anti- Orange faction, and their sympathy and as- sistance, together with an intense frost which enabled the French army to pass the rivers and canals on the ice in the winter of l794-'5, rendered the conquest of Holland by Gen. Pichegru an easy task. The Batavian republic, which in its closing years was administered by the director Schimmelpenninck, a states- man and patriot of eminent ability and integ- rity, terminated in 1806 by the erection of Holland into a kingdom, on the throne of which the emperor Napoleon placed his bro- ther Louis. Louis ruled with moderation and kindness, but his preference of the interests of Holland to those of France gave such of- fence to his imperial brother, that in 1810 he abdicated, and Holland was incorporated as an integral part of the French empire. On the downfall of Napoleon the prince of Or- ange, who had been in exile in England, was declared king by an assembly of notables, under the title of William I., with a constitution lim- iting his power within moderate bounds. The ancient southern provinces, which had remain- ed under Spanish rule at the time of the great revolution of the 16th century, and had subse- quently belonged to the house of Austria, were annexed to Holland by the congress of Vienna, with the object of forming a power of sufficient force to serve as a check to the progress of France toward the northeast. The difference of race, religion, language, and manners, how- ever, prevented the assimilation of the two sections into one nation ; and on the outbreak of the French revolution of 1830 the southern provinces revolted, and, aided by the French, established their independence as the kingdom of Belgium, with Leopold of Saxe-Ooburg as king. The final settlement between the two kingdoms took place in 1839, when that part of Luxemburg which had been constituted by the congress of Vienna a grand duchy under the king of the Netherlands, was enlarged by a portion of Belgian Limburg. Since the separation the kingdom of the Netherlands has continued flourishing and peaceful, and has made rapid advances in prosperity and opulence. In 1848, after the French revolution of that year, the constitution was still further liberalized, and extensive reforms were intro- duced. William I. abdicated in 1840 in favor of his son William II., who died in 1849, and was succeeded by William III., the present king. In August, 1862, the states general passed a law for the abolition of slavery in the Dutch West Indies, which went into operation July 1, 1863. During the war between France and Germany the Netherlands maintained a strict neutrality. With the exception of occasional conflicts with the natives in some of their East India colonies, the most important of which was a war with Acheen in the island of Suma- tra in 1873- 1 5, the Netherlands have been en- gaged in no war with a foreign power since the conclusion of the treaty with Belgium in 1839. The contests between the liberal and conservative parties in regard to questions of internal policy have for several years been very bitter, but, with unimportant exceptions, have been carried on in conformity with the consti- tution and laws. See Schiller, GescMchte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung ; Bilderdijk, Geschie- denis des vaderlands (12 vols., 1832-'9) ; Leo, Zwolf Bucher niederldndischer GescMchte (2 vols., 1832-'5); and Motley, "The Rise of the Dutch Republic" (3 vols., 1856), "The His- tory of the United Netherlands," &c. (4 vols., 1860-'67), and " The Life and Death of John of Barneveld" (2 vols., 1874). NETHERLANDS, Language and Literature of the. Under the title GERMANIC RACES AND LAN- GUAGES, the development of the Dutch lan- guage, and the relation which it holds to the other languages of the Teutonic group, have been discussed. The Dutch alphabet consists of 23 letters, counting ch. It does not in- clude c, ^, JT, or y, which occur only in words derived from other languages. H is ^ always an aspirate, and is never written, as in Ger- man, merely to lengthen a vowel. G and ch are nearly alike, resembling in sound the ch in the Scotch loch ; g is not quite so guttural. When I is preceded by a vowel and followed by a consonant, a slight short e is sounded between it and the consonant. Sch is not pro- nounced together as in German, but the and