CRIME IN HOLLAND

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17693, 2 August 1919, Page 7

CRIME IN HOLLAND

COUNTRY OVERRUN BY BURGLARS. WAR MAKES SOLDIERS INTO THIEVES. (Correspondent New York Herald.) THE HAGUE, May 3. lo those who knew tho Hollander boforo tho war «is a quiet, well-behaved, thrifty, and industrious soul, content to pursue tho oven tenor of his way and sticking religiously to orderliness and good behaviour, his transformation sinco the signing of the armistice last November will come as a genuine shock.

Crime, in the pre-war days, was at its minimum in Holland. Her standing army of son;o 50,000 was composed of tho young men who served their .allotted time in tho military service of their country with tho minimum of grumbling, returning cheerfully .to the plough or the dairy, or tho fisheries, as soon as their term of army service was over.

Except for an ever watchful eye on her frontiers, Holland livod a calm, contented existence, turning out her world-famous cheeses and her, perhaps, moro infamous gms, her citizens sccur? in the feeling that there was a land where the law was observed, where their chattels wore, safe even though their front doors remained unlocked, and where the infrequent offenctor against the penal code could not hope to get liis full name in the papers, much less his photograph with a pretty bordor around it.

To-day all this is changed. From a land of safety Holland has been transformed into a land of danger, and the Hollander —that is. he who is represented in the ranks of tho plough boy, the driver of the horse or donkey along the tow path, the chnrner of the butter and tho cream, the farm hand or the miller's assistant—has been transformed into a shiftless, la-zy, disorderly ne'er-do-well, whose princinal occupation is burglary! ■ IT IS A NEW CRIME. Burglary in Holland was not a usual crime in the pre-war days. The fact makes tho present wave of lawlessness all the more striking. Tho great truth that has dawned upon the country is that the 800,000 Hollanders who have been doing military service as non-combatants sinoo the beginning of the war, have come to hate work and to hate having to provide for their own living, after enjoying food, olothing, and shelter at Government expense for nearly five years. When Holland mobilised her young manhood, middle aged manhood, and full-blown manhood during the first six months of the war, when there was momentary danger of" Germany suddenly getting it into her disordered brain to invade and spoil tiho Netherlands, as well as Belgium, the Dutnh Government provided for tho support of the families of tho soldiers whom she mobilised as well as for the support of the soldiers themselves.

In her well-ordered house, Holland could not see 800,000 families in want because 800,000 male supporters were taken for the defence of the Fatherland. She provided this support as punctiliously and as carefully as she provided for the thousands of Belgian and French refugees, who have lived on the country's bounty from the day of the siege of Antwerp to the day that Marshal Fooh handed his fountain pen to the German armistice commission and said: " Sign."

With the demobilisation that began during the latter days of last November the discharged soldiers found it irksome to resumo their duties as family providers instead of "letting Welhelmina do it." The plough did not appeal nearly so much as the light field employment along the frontier. Tho long "hikes" along the towpaths were not nearly so attractive as the short stretches between Holland's eastern provinces and tho Westphalian or Prussian country. It was found a hard matter to get tho Hollander back into a civilian job, not because tho job was not there but bocauso tha erstwhile thrifty Dutchman no longer cared for the job. FOOD SHORTAGE A CAUSE. For many months now life for the la;w'abiding Dutchman and his family has been anything but a paradise, and the shortage of foodi has been but a small matter in tho grand total of this general unhappiness. The principal thing that has been worrying Holland has been tho burglar, who has since before the Christmas holidays become a sort of national institution, like the cheesa and gin. Acts of violence are of daily, in fact, of hourly, occurrence in the country districts as well as in the cities. Not alone must dcors be securely locked and bolted at night, but if during the daytime the householder turns his back to look over his chickens in the barnyard without first closing his front door he will most likely return to the " pronk kamer " (parlour) only to find every article of intrinsic value has disappeared.

The theft of silverware, jewellery, clothes, and even pots and pans from the kitchen is reported to the police in every town and hamlet on an average of once every hour during the 24 hours of the day. The flow of complaints is so steady that in most places one man is assigned to do nothing but record these reports of burglaries. While, of course, it would be unfair to say that every one of the demobilised soldiers has turned burglar after receiving his discharge from the army, it is safe to say that one-half of the eight hundred thousand troops has turned its attention to either burglary, petty or grand larceny, or highway robbery as a means to keep the wolf from the door without an undue amount of physical exertion. The visitor in Holland, although he is still much in the minority because of the Eassport restrictions, has "learned to keep is hand on his wallet pocket and his fingers firmly around the end of a stout cane whenever he ventures out into the street or along a country path once Holland's delight and the safest promenade in the wide jvorld.

r DARING HIGHWAY ROBBERIES. . Tiie " kwajongems," who used to stand in proper awe of the well-dressed man or woman in the public thoroughfares of the city, now openly and brazenly snatch at watch chains, ladies' bags or .pocket books that are carried in the u&nds by the ladies. Nine times in ten the culprit manages to make a clean " getaway ' in the crowd of sympathetic ruffians who gather quickly at the first sign of disorder in the street.

Hjo prisons and gaols of Holland are lined to their capacity for the first t.im P j n tho country's history as far back as tho oldest Hollander can remember. Tho newspapers in Holland seldom print tho full namo of an offender against law and order, not because of fear of a libel suit,' but because it has always been believed in Holland to lie an injudicious proceeding to give the offender against the penal code the slightest relief in the way of publicity or notoriety which, as is well known, is the criminal's sweetest balm. The singlo item in the newspaper that related how "the offender S. was caught red-handed in the act of breaking into a residence in tho Heerengracht" and was read by the respectable portion of Holland with much awe and a few gasps of astonishment is now so commonplace that the entire alphabet is used up twice over in printing tho initials of the criminally inclined in the news of tho day before.

Children sent to the stores by the mothers are often the victims of the thieves, who take away their pennies, and market baskets on the way to the expectant housewives very ■often go astray and ulHtintely reach the dens of the underworld, now a real menace i.n the economio and civic life of the Netherlands.

The samo spirit of disregard of the conventions that obtains throughout the country, as far as the rights of others arc concerned obtains in the nation's Parliament—the Staaten Generaal. Ultra-Bolshc-viefcic membeas ocoupy seats in the lower chamber and openlv advocate doctrines which, a year before the war began in 1914, would not have been listened to by any self-respecting Dutchman. The selfrespecting Dutchman must listen to those doctrines now, for they aro preached on every street corner, from the forums and from the platform of the governing body, whenever the radical wing gets a chance to giv e voioo to its sentiments. BLOCKED AT THE FRONTIER.

The Government does everything humanly possible to prevent the influx of the radical element from Germany, and every day dozens of would-b e intruders, bo they Bolshevist or Sparticus, are burned back at the frontier with the admonition to go East. But many slip through, with the result that this formerly quiet, orderly land is fast being poisoned by the seed of violence that has been planted in its fertile soil from the very day that the one-time Kaiser entered the country as a refugee and the one-time Crown Prince took up his involuntary abode on the Island of Wieringen. There is enough of the regular army left to prevent any serious concerted movement by the forces of tho malcontents, especially as they are not organised and no leader has yet out in an appearance. The police in the various districts, too, still observe the street discipline of the pre-war days. Although they have not been very successful in stamping out the lawlessness that is everywhere evident, they are, at least, holding the unruly

element in cheok, and, to a certain degree, holding it in awe of municipal authority. The principal hope of the better educated class of Hollanders lies in an early restoration of the regular channels of food importation. They believe that, as soon as tood becomes less prohibitive in price and labour conditions resume the normal, lawlessness will disappear, and the Hollander will once more become tho tractable, wellbehaved human being he was beforo the war.

Just now tho Hollander is anything but tractable. He will drop his hammer, his shovel, his hoe, or his churning handle at the drop of a hat or the whisper of a lahour agitator, lie imagines tliat he is under-dog of every man who possesses a nickel more than he does. One is quite likely to find, after undertaking a short trip on a tramway, from Den Haag to Scheveningen, for instance, that a striko has been ordered before one gets half-way to his destination. l'rom a land of calm, peaceful, seeming quiet, Holland has changed into a land of unrest. It oozes out of the very ground at every step one takes. Lack of grains keep the grist mills idle, and, consequently, fail to provide work for those who might be induced to take up the broken strands oi their tasks and don the snow-white of the miller for tho blue of the soldier. Empty larders, tho result of the exorbitant prices of foodstuffs, are not conducive to make the discharged soldier eager for hard work and the regular Government stipend that used to come to the good "vrouw" wlnlo her "man" was still shouldering a rifle and watching tho Boche, proved too easy a meat ticket not to .have its end come without considerable regret. 'IHE SHIPPING SITUATION.

Stagnation in shipping, owing to the restrictions placed upon the country by the Allies, has had its natural effect upon Holland s inland waterways commerce, with the result that thousands of men who were employed along the numerous canals, both as boatmen and tow drivers, before the war, now find their vocation gone. This is another important industry which, if it could resume its normal proportions, would Sreatly reduce tile number of unemployed. Over everything, however, looms the one large fact that the formerly correct Hollander could so readily be changed into a man with criminal instincts and to such an extent as to make the entire country, practically, a burglar's paradise. It has surprised the more evenly balanced Hollanders as muoh as it has surprised foreigners who have come here from England or France or Belgium and who knew Hollanders as a class that might be taciturn, headstrong, stubborn or unreasonable, but which they never would have believed could develop natural criminal instincts.

. The authorities assort that as soon, as the country gets into its normal run onco more, through the lifting of the present trade embargoes and the various lines of industry are once more open to unrestricted employment, the workman class in Holland will shako its Mr Hyde personality and resume its normal Dr Jekyll habits of order and industry. Holland is going through a bad dream at present which, at times, assumes the proportions of a hideous nightmare. When the country wakes up to a better era upon the completion of the post-war adjustments, from which tho country will, without question, profit through the tremendous demand upon its splendid natural resources, her citizens will likewise wake ut> to higher ideals than robbery and other forms of criminality. For this reason, if for no other, Queen Wilhelmina and those of her subjects who have remained in the same group are ferVOTtly_ hoping that international conditions will right themselves before their country goes to tho dogs altogether.