We may smile at these things; yet the most wise of all ages will admire the purity and earnestness of this people. They brought with them the love of learning. In a very few years schools began to appear. Such means as could be afforded were freely given. Some tolerably qualified brother was "entreated to become the schoolmaster." Soon a law was passed that every township, containing fifty families, must have a common school. Harvard College was established within fifteen years of the landing. The founders of New England were men who had known at home the value of books. Brewster carried with him a library of two hundred and seventy-five volumes, and his was not the largest collection in the colony. At that time books were very scarce and twenty times more costly than they are now. Twenty-three years after the landing of the pilgrims, the population of New England had grown to twenty-four thousand. {135} Forty-nine little wooden towns, with their wooden churches, wooden forts and wooden ramparts, were dotted here and there over the land. There were then four separate colonies: Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven. For mutual defense and protection these colonies united together and thus formed the first confederation of states on the western continent. CHAPTER XIV. THE CONFLICT IN THE NETHERLANDS. DESCRIPTION OF HOLLAND--A LAND OF REFUGE--TYRANNY OF ALVA--THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE--SIEGE OF LEYDEN--THE COUNTRY SUBMERGED--FAMINE IN THE CITY--SPEECH OF THE MAYOR--HEROIC CONDUCT--TRUST IN GOD--STORM RAISES THE WATERS--SPANIARDS RETREAT--LEYDEN IS SAVED--THANKSGIVING--WATERS RETIRE. In a previous chapter have been described the circumstances which led to the colonization of Acadia and New England. While these events were transpiring in old England and New England, others of scarcely less importance were occurring in Holland, or the Netherlands, as it is frequently called, and in its colony of New Netherlands. It is a fact too frequently forgotten, that at least three of the thirteen original states were colonized by Holland. It is true Pennsylvania and Delaware received a few colonists from Sweden and Finland, who had settled there to escape religious persecution; but their dominions in the new world were not of long duration. To Holland and England belong the chief glory of colonizing the lands embraced in the United Colonies of 1776. The country now embraced in the states of New York, New Jersey and {136} Delaware, received the name of New Netherlands, and like the inhabitants of New England, they were for the most part a religious people.