"The record of all deeds and mortgages in a public office, a custom which affects every man and woman who owns or buys property, came to America direct from Holland. It never came from England, since it does not exist there even at the present day.
"The township system, by which each town has local self-government, with its natural sequence of local self-government in county and State, came from Holland.
"The practice of making prisoners work, and turning prisons into workhouses, and, in fact, our whole modern American management of free prisons which has caused the admiration of the entire world, was brought from Holland to America by William Penn.
"Group these astonishing facts together, if you will, and see their tremendous import: The Federal Constitution; the Declaration of Independence; the whole organization of the Senate; our State Constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town, county and State systems of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages; the giving of every criminal a just chance for his life; a public prosecutor of crime in every county; our free prison workhouse system--to say nothing of kindred important and vital elements in our national life. When each and all of these can be traced directly to one nation, or to the influence of that nation, and that nation not England, is it any wonder, asks one enlightened historian, that some modern scholars, who, looking beneath the mere surface resemblance of language, seek an explanation of the manifest difference between the people of England and the people of the United States assumed by them to be of the same blood, and influenced by the same (?) institutions?
"Nor is it strange that so strong a Dutch influence should have entered into the establishment and making of America, when one considers the immense debt which the world owes to Holland. For it may be said without fear of contradiction that in nearly every art which uplifts and adorns human life, in nearly every aspect of human endeavor, Holland has not only added to the moral resources of mankind and contributed more to the fabric of civilization, but has also actually led the way. It was the first nation to master the soil and teach agriculture to the world. It has taught the world the art of gardening. It taught commerce and merchandise to the entire world when it ranked as the only great commercial nation on the globe. It taught the broadest lines of finance to the world by the establishment, in 1609, of its great Bank of Amsterdam, with one hundred and eighty millions of dollars deposits, preceding the establishment of the Bank of England by nearly one hundred years. The founding of its great University of Leyden, in 1575, marked an epoch in the world's history of education, and made the Netherlands the centre of learning of Europe. Here was founded international law through Grotius, one of Holland's greatest sons. Here Boerhaave, a Dutchman, revolutionized medicine by his wonderful discoveries until Holland's medical school became the seat of authority for all Europe. From this centre, too, came that great lesson in the publishing of books in the shape of the famous Elzevir books. It was the first nation to place the reader and the spelling-book in the hands of the child, irrespective of station or means. As musicians, for nearly two hundred years the Netherlands stood supreme, and furnished all the courts of Europe with vocal and instrumental music. It was the Dutch who founded, in Naples, the first musical conservatory in the world, and another in Venice, and it was to their influence and example that the renowned school of Rome owed its existence.