As the nation was free to think and to express their thoughts, nothing practical or useful escaped them: the question as to the influence of the drainage of lakes on the health of the inhabitants was ably discussed during the last century, more especially as to the result of draining the lowlands of Biensten, de Wonner, &c. M. Ungo Waard and others describe the sickness which took place on the drainage of Bleewyksthe. In Haarlem, in 1779, the deaths exceeded those of the previous year by 396; in Amsterdam, by 1727; in Groningen, by 752. The previous summer had been hot and dry, offering another proof that the vegetable humus thus exposed to the air, fermenting and rotting, was the cause of the sickness and increased mortality. In this land there was no room--no margin, to use a commercial phrase--for experiments on the pockets and the health of its citizens; they were citizens, not subjects--far-seeing men, who calculated everything _d’avance_. And now the draining of the lake of Haarlem shows that the race has lost little of its ancient spirit of enterprise and industry, of that applicative invention to the wants of civilized man which gives to Holland and to her colonies an aspect to which no other country bears any resemblance. The poisoning of rivers and streams by any combination of adventurers could never happen there, and the scenes we have witnessed lately in England would be wholly unintelligible in Holland. It is here that vast morasses, seemingly valueless, are being converted into fertile meadows, by processes of which the natives of other countries have not the slightest knowledge. In this land it is the law that, before any one be permitted to convert a peat bog into a lake by the abstraction of the peat, security is demanded of him as to his means to drain the lake about to be formed, to embank the excavation, and to convert it into a healthy fertile meadow; in England, on the contrary, such cautious procedure is held in the most sovereign contempt, as wholly unworthy that fine chivalrous character for pluck, daring, and exciting enterprise and speculation which marks the free-born Briton.