246 Chapter XI
The Americans, on declaring their independence, threw off the British trade
regulations and invited direct commerce with the Continent of Europe. Commer-
cial men of Amsterdam, both those who were regents and those who were not,
hastened to engage in this lucrative new traffic. The city of Amsterdam, which is to
say its regents, even made a secret treaty in 1778 with a representative of the
United States. An enthusiasm for the American Revolution swept over the great
commercial metropolis. When eight United States ships docked there in 1779,
they found that a Dutch lady had composed a song, in English, in ten stanzas, in
their honor.^5
That Amsterdam could thus determine its own foreign policy, to say the least,
revealed the particularism, the internal division, and the unworkable confusion of
uncentralized powers in the republic as set up long ago by the Union of Utrecht.
Amsterdam was naturally supported in its course by the French, who wished to
bring its merchant marine and its capital into the war, and denounced by the Brit-
ish and by the Orange party. In 1780 Great Britain declared war on the United
Provinces, and began to assail the Dutch shipping and colonies.
It must be remembered that British colonial and commercial primacy was
widely felt to be of recent growth, quite possibly soon to end. American and
French military successes persuaded many Dutch capitalists that the British em-
pire had already passed its zenith, and even that British securities were no longer a
good investment. In 1780, on the eve of war with the Dutch, the British govern-
ment was able to borrow, with difficulty, only about a million guilders in Holland.
Two years later the French government borrowed 5,000,000 guilders in a single
day. A sum of the same size was loaned in that year to the United States of Amer-
ica, and Dutch capital also flowed into private American land and canal compa-
nies. On the eve of the French Revolution, French credit remained strong in Hol-
land, so far were practical men from supposing the French monarchy to be
tottering. In 1782 Dutch investments in Britain stood at 280,000,000 guilders, as
against only 25,000,000 in France. Comparable figures are not available for the
following years, but, in 1786, Dutch income from French securities almost equalled
that from British. In the absence of other means of satisfactory measurement, this
flight of Dutch capital suggests the substantial character and the strength of the
Patriot movement.^6
In broadest terms, the Patriot party, at the outset, was an unstable compound
of regent and popular elements, anti- Orange and anti- British, produced by the
crisis of the Fourth English War, as the Dutch call the War of American Inde-
pendence. The Dutch, outside the Orange party, saw the war as a defense of their
shipping, their navy, and their colonies from the depredations of the British fleet.
5 F. E d ler, The Dutch Republic and the American Revolution (Baltimore, 1911), is diplomatic his-
tory of the narrowest kind. The Dutch lady’s song is printed in A. Loosjes, Gedenkzuil ter gelegenheid
der Vrij- verklaaring van Noord- Amerika (Amsterdam, 1782).
6 For these details on Dutch capital see C. H. Wilson, Anglo- Dutch Commerce and Finance in the
18th Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1941), 189–204; J. P. Manger, Recherches sur les relations économiques
entre la France et la Hollande pendant la Révolution française, 1785–1795 (Paris, 1923), 17; E. Baasch,
Hollandische Wirtschaftsgeschichte ( Jena, 1927), 205–6.