Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

Chapter 11:

And the Dutch Bourgeoisie Was Virtuous
Yes, but surely the Dutch of the Golden Age did not actually carry out their painted and poemed project of the virtues? Surely the bourgeoisie then as now were mere hypocrites, the comically middle class figures in a Molière play; or, worse, of a late-Dickens novel; or, still worse, of an e. e. cummings poem, n’est ce pas?

No, it appears not. In an essay noting the new prominence of “responsibility” in a commercial America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries Thomas Haskell asserts that "my assumption is not that the market elevates morality." But then he takes it back: "the form of life fostered by the market may entail the heightened sense of agency."²²⁰  Just so.  Surely commerce, with 17th-century science, heightened the sense of agency.  Earlier in the essay Haskell had attributed the "escalating" sense to markets. So the market does elevate morality.   It did in market saturated Holland.

“Charity,” for example, “seems to be very national among them,” as Temple wrote at the time (Temple DATE, iv, p. 88). The historian Charles Wilson claimed in DATE that “it is doubtful if England or any other country [at least until the late 18^th century] could rival the scores of almshouses for old men and women, the orphanages, hospitals and schools maintained by private endowments from the pockets of the Dutch regents class” (Wilson, date, p. 55). The fact is indisputable. But its interpretation has made recent historians uneasy.

Their problem is that like everyone else nowadays the historians are not comfortable with a rhetoric of virtues. An act of love or justice is every time to be reinterpreted as, somehow, prudence. Anne McCants, for example, begins her fine book on Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (1997) with a discussion of how hard it is to believe in altruistic motives from such hard bourgeois and bourgeoises. A compassionate motivation for transfers from the wealthy to the poor is said to be “unlikely” and “can be neither modeled nor rationally explained.” By “rational” she seems to mean “single-mindedly following prudence only.” By “modeled” she seems to mean “put into a Max U framework that a conventional Samuelsonian economist would be comfortable with.” “Max U” is a man with the last name “U” who people’s economic argument since Paul Samuelson formalized him in the late 1930s. The joke I am making is that in the only way that an economist knows how to think about life after Samuelson one Max-imizes a Utility function. Max U cares only for the virtue of prudence—note by the way the contradiction in “caring for,” that is, loving prudence, that is loving the hypothesis of non-love. Compassionate explanations, contrary to Max U, are “not to be lightly dismissed as implausible,” McCants writes. But then she lightly dismisses the compassionate explanations, with a scientific method misapprehended—altruism, she says, holds “little predictive power.” She has adopted the orphan Max U from Paul Samuelson over in another building at MIT.

“After a long tradition of seeing European charity largely as a manifestation of Christian values,” McCants is relieved to report, “scholars have begun to assert the importance of self-interest.”²²¹ Her own interpretation of the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage is that it was “charity for the middling,” a species of insurance against the risks of capitalism. The bourgeois said to themselves: there but for the grace of God go our own orphaned bourgeois children; let us therefore create an institution against that eventuality.²²² As Hobbes put it in reducing all motives to self-interest, “Pity is imagination of fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s calamity.” {search and cite: is it in an essay, “On Human Nature”?] McCants makes as good a case as can be made for her strictly Hobbesian view of human virtues. But the case is feeble. And anyway as a matter of method the virtue of prudence does not have to crowd out temperance, justice, love, courage, faith, and hope, not 100 percent.

The unease of modern historians in the presence of virtues shows in six of the pages the leading historian of the Dutch Republic writing in English, the admirable Jonathan Israel, devotes in one of his massive and scholarly books, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise and Fall (1995), to the Golden-Age poor law. It was he admits at the outset an “elaborate system of civic poor relief and charitable institutions . . . exceptional in European terms.”²²³ The assignment of the poor to each confession, including the Jews (and even eventually in the 18^th century the Catholics), foreshadows the so-called “pillarization” (verzuiling) of Dutch politics, revived by Abraham Kuyper in the late 19^th century: sovereignty in ones own domain, and therefore a responsibility for compassion towards ones own poor.

“But,” Israel claims, “charity and compassion. . . were not the sole motives.”²²⁴ And then he lists all the prudential, self-interested reasons for taking care of the poor. His first seems the least plausible—that “the work potential of orphans” was worth marshalling. Oakum picking could scarcely pay for even the first bowl of porridge, even in Dickens. He turns to civic pride among towns and social prestige inside a town to be got from running a “caring, responsible, and well-ordered” set of institutions. Certainly the innumerable commissioned paintings of this or that charitable board argue that the pride and prestige was worth getting. But it is hard to see how such rewards to vanity can be distinguished from the virtue of charity itself, at any rate if we are to confine our historical science in positivistic style to "predictive power." If caring is not highly valued by the society then doing it in well-ordered institutions will not earn social prestige. “High value of caring” is called “charity.”

“At bottom,” though, Israel continues—and now we approach the prudential bottom line—the alleged acts of charity were “rather effective instruments of social control,” to support the deserving poor (that is, our very own Dutch Reform poor in Rotterdam, say). It amounted to paying off the poor to behave.²²⁵ The equally admirable Paul Langford makes a similar assertion about the later flowering of charity in England. The hospitals and foundling homes of the 18^th century were “built on a foundation of bourgeois sentiment mixed with solid self-interest.”²²⁶ Ah-hah. Caught again being prudent. The Dutch and English bourgeoisie were not really charitable at all, you see. They were simply canny. The rascals.

Such arguments would not persuade, I think, unless one were determined to find a profane rather than a sacred cause for every act of charity. One hundred percent. When the argument is made it is it usually unsupported by reasoning and evidence. McCants does offer a little reasoning and evidence for her cynical view, but that is what makes her book unusual. Most other historians, even Israel and Langford, don’t. The lack of argument in even such excellent scholarship indicates that the cynicism is being brought into the history from the outside. No one, even such gifted historians as Israel and Langford and McCants, explains exactly how “social control” or “self-interest” was supposed to result from giving large sums of money to the poor. It often hasn’t. But in any event no historian tells how, or offers evidence that the how in fact was efficacious in the Dutch case. A hermeneutics of suspicion is made to suffice.

But it doesn't compute. The question arises, for example, why other nations did not have the same generous system of charity—that is, if it was such an obviously effective instrument of social control, requiring no proof of its efficacy from the historian, or if it was so very self-interested that any fool could see its utility. The acts of love, justice, and, yes, prudence were in any case astonishingly widespread in the Netherlands, and became so a century later in England and Scotland. Israel ends his discussion by implying that in 1616 fully twenty percent of the population of Amsterdam was “in receipt of charity,” either from the town itself or from religion- or guild-based foundations.²²⁷ The figure does not mean that the poor got all their income from charity, of course, merely that one fifth of the people in the city received something, perhaps a supplement in cold and workless times of year. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, who are better at dealing with statistics than Israel, put the figure lower, but still high: "In Amsterdam as many as 10 to 12 percent of all households received at least temporary support during the winter months." The figure is high by any standard short of a modern and northern European welfare state. De Vries and van der Woude note that "it is the steadiness of charitable expenditure . . . that distinguishes Dutch practice from other countries, where most financing . . . was triggered by emergency conditions.”²²⁸

Charity was by the Golden Age an old habit in the little cities of the Low Countries. Geoffrey Parker notes that by the 1540s in Flanders one seventh of the population of Ghent was in receipt of poor relief, one fifth at Ypres, one quarter at Bruges.²²⁹ Prudential explanations of such loving justice seem tough-minded only if one thinks of prudence as tough, always, and love as soft, always, and for some reason you want to be seen as tough, always. But the charity was evidently no small matter. It was bizarre in the European context. It is hard to see the charity as prudence only.

The first large bourgeois society in Northern Europe was charitable.

* * * *

Nor was the exceptional Dutch virtue of tolerance, dating from the late 16^th century and full-blown in the theories of Grotius, Uyttenbogaert, Fijne, and especially Episcopius in the 1610s and 1620s a matter entirely of prudence. The Dutch stopped in the 1590s actually burning heretics and witches. This was early by European standards. The last burning of a Dutch witch was 1595, in Utrecht, an amusement which much of the rest of Europe—and Massachusetts, too, where Quakers were burned on Boston Common—would not decide to abandon for another century. In the fevered 1620s hundreds of German witches were burnt every year [GET SOURCE FOR THIS]. So late as January 8, 1697 in Scotland one Thomas Aikenhead, an Edinburgh student, was tried and hanged for blasphemy, aged 19, for denying the divinity of Christ—alleged by one witness, and part of a youthful pattern of bold talk. The event was the last hurrah of what Arthur Herman calls the ayatollahs of the Scottish Kirk (Herman date, pp. 2-10). After that they were on the defensive, though able to block university appointments, say, and keep skeptics like David Hume quiet.

By contrast the 13^th article of the Treaty of Utrecht had stipulated 120 years before Aikenhead’s execution that “Everyone must remain free in his religion,” though of course observing suitable privacy, since religion was still a matter of state. “No one should be molested or questioned on the subject of divine worship.”²³⁰ In 1579 that was a shocking assertion, and could not be expected to be literally followed—and was not. But by contemporary Christian standards the Dutch were then and later astonishingly tolerant.

The obvious test case was Judaism—though Catholicism, as the religion of the Spanish or of the sometimes-enemy French, was often treated in Holland with even more hostility. That same Grotius, who was no 21^st-century liberal, advised against liberal treatment of the Jews across the Dutch Republic. But the States General in 1619 decided, against his advice, that each Dutch town individually should decide for itself how to treat them, and forbad any town to insist that Jews wear special clothing. True, it was not until 1657 that the Dutch Jews became actual, full-rights subjects of the Republic. But by comparison with their liabilities down to the 19^th century in Germany or England, not to speak of Spain and Portugal, the Dutch Jews were exceptionally free. No locking up in ghettos at night, for example, as in Venice or Frankfurt; no expulsions and appropriations. In 1616 Rabbi Uziel (late of Fez in Morocco) remarked that the Jews “live peaceably in Amsterdam,” and “each may follow his own belief, but may not openly show that he is of a different faith from the inhabitants of the city.”²³¹ It is the melting-pot formula of not being allowed to wear special clothing, of the sort that in 2003 secular France affirmed in respect of shawls for Moslem women.

And so nowadays. Since the 1960s, and after a long period of conformity to the Dutch Reformed Church, tolerance is witnessing a second golden age in the Netherlands. Outside the train station in Hilversum, the center for Dutch radio and TV, stands a block of stone representing praying hands, with the word carved on its sides in Dutch, Russian, Spanish, and English. Tolerance, verdraagzaamheid (from dragen, “bear,” in the way that "toleration" is from Latin tollere). It is the central word in the civic religion of modern Holland in the way that “equality” is in the civic religion of Sweden or “freedom” in the civic religion of the United States. That is, it does not always happen, but it is much admired and much talked of.

Dutch people react uncomfortably to praise for their tolerance, especially for the new sort of tolerance growing among Catholics after Vatican II and among Protestants after the startling decline of the Dutch Reformed Church. A society heavily influenced by Dutch-Reform dominies, as not long ago the Netherlands was, would not be particularly tolerant of gays or marihuana, for example. Thus the anti-homosexual hysteria in the Netherlands in 1740-42 (after which the Dutch, unlike everyone else down to very recent times, were ashamed). But Michael Zeeman notes that the anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical movement of the 1960s was more successful in the Netherlands than anywhere else.²³² The transformation from a church-going, respectable society, divided into “pillars” by religious group and stratified by class, into the present-day free-wheeling Holland has been astonishing.

The Dutch reply nowadays with an uncomfortable, “You don’t know how intolerant we really are.” Progressive Dutch people nowadays move directly to embarrassments—for riches, for slavery, for imperialism, for the handing over of the Dutch Jews, for capitalism, for Srebencia, for their countrymen’s embarrassing reaction to immigrants in the 1990s and especially the 2000s. “We’re not really so tolerant,” they repeat. To which foreigners now and in the 17^th century reply that the Dutch do not know how really intolerant the competition is.

In the 17^th century most visitors were appalled, not delighted, by religious toleration in the United Provinces. The notion one king/one religion was still lively, and still seemed worth a few dead heretics—one third of the population of Germany, 1618-1648, for example. Israel notes that foreigners then as now tended to judge the Dutch character by the metropolises of Amsterdam and Rotterdam rather than by the lesser and less liberal places.²³³ But even with that bias the Dutch were exceptionally tolerant by 17^th-century European standards, as they were exceptionally charitable. Henri IV of France had attempted before his assassination in 1610 to bring a gentle skepticism worthy of his friend Montaigne to undecidable religious questions. Huguenots, in his view (he had been raised as one), could be loyal Frenchmen.²³⁴ But later rulers, especially the cardinal-rulers Richelieu and Mazarin, chipped away at the tolerations of the Edict of Nantes (1598) until in 1685 the Edict was officially revoked. The Poles had as early as 1573, six year before the Treaty of Utrecht, declared for religious freedom, and were the earliest polity in Europe to do so. The declaration was characteristic of the Erasmian strain in Poland, like the tolerant Dutch. The Seym declared that “Whereas in our Commonwealth there is no small disagreement in the matter of Christian faith, and in order to prevent that any harmful contention should arise from this, as we see clearly taking place in other kingdoms, we swear to each other. . . that. . . we will keep the peace between us.”²³⁵ And they did. Erasmus had written long before to the Archbishop of Canterbury, “Poland is mine.” And it was, until the 17^th century. “When the tower of Kraków’s Town Hall had been rebuilt in 1556,” Adam Zamoyski notes, “a copy of Erasmus’ New Testament was immured in the brickwork.”²³⁶ And a later Dutch advocate of moderate toleration, Grotius, remarked that “To wish to legislate on religion is not Polish.” But, Zampoyski continues, “when the same tower was repaired in 1611 the book was replaced by a Catholic New Testament. . . . One vision of life was replaced by another, the spirit of inquiry”---thus for example Mikołaj Kopernik, known to Europe as Copernicus---“by one of piety. . . . If Erasmus was the beacon for all thinking Poles in the 1550s, the Jesuits were the mentors of their grandchildren.” In 1632 the tolerant oath of 1573 was amended: other faiths were now merely “graciously permitted” to be exercised, but Catholicism was “mistress in her own house,” and henceforth, as in France, the Protestants were to be viewed as foreigners, and hostile to the nation.²³⁷

“Then, only Holland survived as a haven of tolerance,” writes Stephen Toulmin, “to which Unitarians and other unpopular sects could retreat for protection.”²³⁸ Consider for example the Dutch events immediately following August 23 in that same year, 1632. Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange (but no king, mind you, merely the elected “holder” of the Dutch state: he was prince of Orange, in southern France, not of the Netherlands), took the southern and Catholic city of Maastricht from the Spaniards. Yet he permitted there for a time the continued free exercise of the Catholic religion. The poet Vondel of Amsterdam, the Dutch Shakespeare, his family expelled when he was a child from Antwerp for being Anabaptists, was by 1632 not yet a Catholic convert. But he was very active in support of Grotius and other even more forward thinkers in favor of toleration. So he wrote a poem for the occasion of Maastricht’s conquest praising the Prince’s triumph and tolerance, in contrast to the dagger of the Italian Duke of Parma in Philip II’s service, who in the same city a half century before had drunk the “tasty burgers’ blood.”

One can argue in the easy and cynical and 20^th-century way that some of Frederik Hendrik’s tolerance came from mere prudence in a political game, especially the game played so skillfully by the House of Orange. The Dutch stadhouders like Frederick Hendrick were in effect the elected presidents of particular provinces, drawn usually and then exclusively from the House of Orange. Now it is a cliché of 16^th and 17^th century European history that religion was used by state-builders, sometimes amazingly cynically, as when Cardinal Richelieu arranged on behalf of a Catholic French monarchy for secret and then public subsidies to the Swedish Lutheran armies fighting the Catholic Habsburgs. Dutch politics was dominated for a century by the question whether or not the Netherlands should become a Christian city on a hill, as the radical Calvinists wished and as they believed they had achieved in Geneva, in early Massachusetts, and under kings in Scotland. Against this plan the men like Frederik Hendrik sometimes joined with the upper bourgeoisie, the regents, to counterbalance orthodox opinion railing against tolerating the “libertines [as the orthodox called the liberals], Arminians [followers of the liberal Dutch theologian Arminius of , atheists, and concealed Jesuits.”²³⁹ Yet at other times the Orange stadhouders supported Calvinist orthodoxy. It depended on political convenience, one could say. Religion, to repeat, was politics. Soon after the triumph at Maastricht, for example, Frederik Hendrik found it convenient to abandon his liberal friends and take up again with the Calvinists. Prudence. Maastricht was worth a mass. And Amsterdam was worth suppressing one. So much for principled toleration.

And you could say that businesspeople need in prudence to be tolerant, at least superficially, if they earn their living from dealing with foreigners. William of Orange himself had noted in 1578 that it was desirable to go easy on Calvinists "because we [Dutch] are necessarily hosts to merchants . . . of neighboring realms who adhere to this religion."²⁴⁰ By the 17^th century the city of Amsterdam alone had many more ships than Venice did. By 1670 about 40 percentage of the tonnage of European ships was Dutch (and even nowadays a large share of the long-distance trucking in Europe is in Dutch hands).²⁴¹ The liberal pamphleteer Pieter de la Court (of the illiberal town of Leiden), Israel recounts, urged in 1669 “the need to tolerate Catholicism and attract more immigrants of diverse religions. . . to nourish trade and industry.”²⁴² Similar appeals to prudence had been made by the pioneering liberal pamphleteers of the 1620s.

But rationalize as you will, the Dutch liberal regents and the Dutch owners of ships had of course ethical reasons, too, for persisting, as likewise their more strictly Calvinist enemies, the so-called Counter-Remonstrants, had as well. Both sides were in part spiritually motivated. That people sometimes lie about their motives, or also have prudent reasons for their acts, or are misled, does not mean that all protestations of the sacred are so much hypocrisy. "Religion is a complex thing," wrote Trevor-Roper long ago, "in which many human instincts are sublimated and harmonized" [thus the secularism of the age of anthropology], "and political ambition is only one among these." When the advanced liberal (“libertine”) theorist Simon Episcopius wrote in 1627 that only “free minds and hearts . . . are willing to support the common interest,” perhaps—startling thought—that is what he actually believed, and for which against his prudential interests he was willing to pledge his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor.²⁴³ In other words, perhaps it is not only his pocketbook but his spirit that was motivating him. More than zero percent.

This of course is obvious. It would be strange indeed to explain the more than century-long madness of religious politics in the Low Countries after the Beggars’ Compromise of the Nobility of 1566 in terms of material interest, certainly not alone, or even predominantly. As the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark puts it, “most instances of religious dissent make no sense at all in terms of purely material causes; they become coherent only if we assume that people did care.”²⁴⁴

But in the early and mid-20^th century the rhetoric of progressive history writing always wished to remake the sacred into the profane, every time, and to see motives of class and economics behind every professed sentiment. It was a reaction to the nationalist tradition of Romantic history writing. Thus Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) or Georges Lefebvre’s Quatre-vingt neuf (1939: The Coming of the French Revolution) or Christopher Hill’s The English Revolution 1640 (1940). In those times even non-Marxists such as Trevor-Roper wished to slip in at the outset a quantitative estimate of 100 percent for profane prudence. Trevor-Roper added to the concession to the sacred just quoted ("political ambition is only one among" the instincts sublimated in religion) an estimate that "in politics it is naturally by far the most potent."²⁴⁵ Well, sometimes. You don't know on page 3. You need to check it out, with some other theory of human motivation than “prudence-only always rules.”

Stark takes on the notion that the doctrine of an active God could not really be why people became Muslims or Protestants or why they burned people at the stake—or went to the stake declaring, “Be of good cheer Mr. Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day. light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England as I trust never shall be put out.” Surely, as materialist history and sociology from 1910 to 1980 would say without evidence, “at bottom the economic argument must have constituted, more than any dogmatic or religious discussions, the principle motive of the preaching of heresy.”²⁴⁶ Surely, wrote H. Richard Niebuhr in 1929, the quarrels among sects in, say, Holland were phony, a result of “the universal human tendency to find respectable reasons for a practice desired from motives quite independent of the reasons urged.”²⁴⁷ No, replies Stark, and gives much evidence for his view: “These translations of faith into materialism are counterfactual,” in the bad sense of “counterfact, mistake.”²⁴⁸

When the wish to see every behavior as prudence-motivated makes little scientific sense, as often in the Dutch case, it should not be indulged. The battle over toleration in the Netherlands went on for a long time. Israel observes that it was not finally thoroughly resolved in favor of tolerance until around 1700, as it was then too in England (with the exception of civil disabilities for nonconformists), Scotland (with the exception of anti-Catholic prejudice), France (with the exception of an occasional show trial of a Protestant), and the German states (with the exception of a lush growth of anti-Semitism). The hypothesis that European religious toleration was merely a reaction to the excesses of the 17^th century was expressed explicitly by Herbert Butterfield, for example in his posthumous book, Toleration in Religion and Politics (1980): toleration "came in the end through exhaustion, spiritual as well as material."²⁴⁹ But as Peter Zagorin points out, if it were in fact "unaccompanied by a genuine belief," then the labor of two centuries by his heroes Erasmus, More, Sebastian Castellio, Dirck Coornhert, Arminius, Grotius, Escopius, Spinoza, Roger Williams, John Goodwin, Milton, William Walwyn, Locke, and Pierre Bayle, exhaustion would not have mattered.²⁵⁰ ???? It didn't in France as late as 1685, in which the Edict of Nantes, after all, was revoked. The doctrinal enemies of the Huguenots were not governed by prudence only, or else they would not have banished a quarter million of the cream of French craftsmanship and entrepreneurship to Holland, England, Prussia, America, the Cape Colony. Some people in Europe, Protestant and Catholic both, were very willing to carry on, and on, and on with their fatwas. The point here is that an increasing number of people, especially in tolerant Holland, were equally willing to argue and even die for toleration.

Zagorin's 14-man list of honor is in aid of showing that ideas mattered as much as did prudent reaction to disorder. The fourteen names are the 17^th- and 18^th-century men to whom he accords chapter sections in his book, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (2003). Six of the 14 were Dutch, and the Frenchman Bayle spent most of his adult life as a professor in Rotterdam. That makes half.

The Netherlands was the European frontier of liberalism. Locke, finally publishing in the late 1680s, was in many respects a culmination of Dutch thinking. He spent five years in exile there, before returning to England with the Dutch stadholder William, now also the English King, having absorbed in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam the results of the country’s liberal thought from Erasmus through Episcopius to Bayle. He stayed two years in Rotterdam with the English Quaker merchant, Benjamin Furly and was friendly with the Arminian theologian Philip van Limborch, both of whom typified the liberal side of opinion gathered in a tolerant Holland of the 1680s.²⁵¹ Locke’s very first published writings saw light in the Netherlands in the 1680s. And his famous first essay on toleration (1689), as his publications started to flow in earnest (though many of them were started much earlier), was first published for van Limborch at Gouda.²⁵²

Likewise in the United Provinces a wider and older Erasmian humanism was real, and persistent, and virtuous, down to the present day. The broad-church attitudes of Erasmus had became a permanent if not always dominant feature of Dutch intellectual life before Protestantism, and survived its excesses. In uncouth Scotland by contrast, Huizinga notes, Calvinism descended in the mid-16^th century as a 150-year night of orthodoxy, before an intellectual dawn in the early 18^th century.²⁵³ In the Dutch controversies of the 17^th century “Scottish” was a by-word for unethical and self-destructive intolerance.²⁵⁴ In its Dutch version Calvinism “was held in check,” wrote Charles Wilson, “by the cautious Erasmian obstinacy of the ruling merchant class. Freedom of thought, in a remarkable degree, was preserved. Europe . . . was to owe an incalculable debt to the Erasmian tradition and to the dominant class in the Dutch Republic by whose efforts it was protected.”²⁵⁵

All this was surely not crudely self-interested in the way that the historical materialists would wish. Charles Wilson begins his praise of “the Erasmian strain, the belief in reason and rational argument as a means of moral improvement and a way of life” by quoting Huizinga on such qualities as “truly Dutch.”²⁵⁶ That such opinions are old and liberal does not imply in strict logic that they are mistaken. An amused cynicism about such noble themes in history is not always, not every single time, in order. The regents, stadhouders, poets, and intellectuals acted and wrote for self-interested reasons, sometimes, Lord knows. But they acted and wrote for faith, hope, love, temperance, justice, and courage, too. The Lord knows that, too.

In 1764 the English satirist Charles Churchill wrote a poem against everything he didn't like—a long, homophobic blast against "catamites," for example, and (a commonplace at the time) against French luxury and Spanish dogmatism and Italian "souls without vigor, bodies without force.” But he pauses in his rant to accord rare praise:

To Holland, where Politeness ever reigns,

Where primitive Sincerity remains,

And makes a stand, where Freedom in her course

Hath left her name, though she hath lost her force

Which last is to say that the Holland of the Golden Age had decayed by 1764 into a less aggressive, though still very wealthy, place. Yet:

In that, as other lands, where simple trade

Was never in the garb of fraud arrayed

Where Avarice never dared to show his head,

Where, like a smiling cherub, Mercy, led

By Reason, blesses the sweet-blooded race,

And Cruelty could never find a place,

To Holland for that Charity we roam,

Which happily begins, and ends at home.

Charles Churchill, "The Times," 1764

ll. 185-196.