The Evolution of States Part 31
The same may be said of the sister kingdoms, all alike being torn and drained by innumerable strifes of faction and wars with each other. The occasional forcible and dynastic unions of crowns came to nothing; and the Union of Calmar (1397), an attempt to confederate the three kingdoms under one crown, repeatedly collapsed. The marvel is that in such an age even the attempt was made. The remarkable woman who planned and first effected it, Queen Margaret of Norway, appealed in the first instance with heavy bribes for the co-operation of the clergy,[671] who, especially in Sweden, where they preferred the Danish rule to the domination of the n.o.bles,[672] were always in favour of it for ecclesiastical reasons.
Had such a union permanently succeeded, it would have eliminated a serious source of positive political evil; but to carry forward Scandinavian civilisation under the drawbacks of the medieval difficulty of inter-communication (involving lack of necessary culture-contacts), the natural poverty of the soil, and the restrictive pressure of the Catholic Church, would have been a task beyond the power of a monarchy comprising three mutually jealous sections. As it was, the old strifes recurred almost as frequently as before, and moral union was never developed. If historical evidence is to count for anything, the experience of the Scandinavian stocks should suffice to discredit once for all the persistent pretence that the "Teutonic races" have a faculty for union denied to the Celtic, inasmuch as they, apparently the most purely Teutonic of all, were even more irreconcilable, less fusible, than the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and the Germans down till our own day, and much more mutually jealous than the quasi-Teutonic provinces of the Netherlands, which, after the severance of Belgium, have latterly lost their extreme repulsions, while those of Scandinavia are not yet dead.[673] The explanation, of course, is not racial in any case; but it is for those who affirm that capacity for union is a Teutonic gift to find a racial excuse.
With the Reformation, though that was nowhere more clearly than in Scandinavia a revolution of plunder, there began a new progress, in respect not of any friendliness of the Lutheran system to thought and culture, but of the sheer break-up of the intellectual ice of the old regimen. In Denmark the process is curiously instructive. Christian II, personally a capable and reformative but cruel tyrant, aimed throughout his life at reducing the power alike of the clergy and the n.o.bles, and to that end sought on the one hand to abolish serfdom and educate the poor and the burghers,[674] and on the other to introduce Lutheranism (1520). From the latter attempt he was induced to desist, doubtless surmising that the remedy might for him be a new disease: but on his enforcing the reform of slavery he was rebelled against and forced to fly by the n.o.bility, who thereupon oppressed the people more than ever.[675] His uncle and successor, Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, accepted the mandate of the n.o.bles to the extent of causing to be publicly burned in his presence all the laws of the last reign in favour of the peasants, closing the poor schools throughout the kingdom, burning the new books,[676] and pledging himself to expel Lutheranism.
He seems, however, to have been secretly a Protestant, and to have evaded his pledge; and the rapid spread of the new heresy, especially in the cities, brought about a new birth of popular literature in the vernacular, despite the suppression of the schools.[677] In a few years'
time, Frederick, recognising the obvious interest of the crown, and finding the greater n.o.bles in alliance with the clergy, made common cause with the smaller n.o.bility, and so was able (1527) to force on the prelates, who could hope for no better terms from the exiled king, the toleration of Protestantism, the permission of marriage to the clergy, and a surrender of a moiety of the t.i.thes.[678] A few years later (1530) the monasteries were either stormed by the populace or abandoned by the monks, their houses and lands being divided among the munic.i.p.alities, the king and his courtiers, and the secular clergy.[679] After a stormy interregnum, in which the Catholic party made a strenuous reaction, the next king, Christian III, taking the n.o.bles and commons-deputies into partnership, made with their help an end of the Catholic system; the remaining lands, castles, and manors of the prelates going to the crown, and the t.i.thes being parcelled among the landowners, the king, and the clergy. Naturally a large part of the lands, as before, was divided among the n.o.bles,[680] who were in this way converted to Protestantism.
Thus whereas heathen kings had originally embraced Christianity to enable them to consolidate their power, Christian kings embraced Protestantism to enable them to recover wealth and power from the Catholic Church. Creed all along followed interest;[681] and the people had small concern in the change.[682]
Norway, being under the same crown, followed the course of Denmark. In Sweden the powerful Gustavus Vasa saw himself forced at the outset of his reign to take power and wealth from the Church if he would have any of his own; and after the dramatic scene in the Diet of Westeras (1527), in which he broke out with a pa.s.sionate vow to renounce the crown if he were not better supported,[683] he carried his point. The n.o.bles, being "squared"[684] by permission to resume such of their ancestral lands as had been given to churches and convents since 1454, and by promise of further grants, forced the bishops to consent to surrender to the king their castles and strongholds, and to let him fix their revenues; all which was duly done. The monasteries were soon despoiled of nearly all their lands, many of which were seized by or granted in fief to the barons;[685] and the king became head of the Church in as full a degree as Henry VIII in England;[686] sagaciously, and in part unscrupulously, creating for the first time in Scandinavia a strong yet not wholly despotic monarchy, with such revenues from many sources[687] as made possible the military power and activity of Gustavus Adolphus, and later the effort of Charles XII to create an "empire"--an effort which, necessarily failing, reduced Sweden permanently to her true economic basis.
Apart from those remarkable episodes, the development of the Scandinavian States since the sixteenth century has been, on their relatively small scale, that of the normal monarchic community with a variously vigorous democratic element; shaken frequently by civil strife; wasting much strength in insensate wars; losing much through bad kings and gaining somewhat from the good; pa.s.sing painfully from bigotry to tolerance; getting rid of their old aristocracies and developing new; exhibiting in the ma.s.s the northern vice of alcoholism, yet maintaining racial vigour; disproportionately taxing their producers as compared with their non-producers; aiming, nevertheless, at industry and commerce, and suffering from the divisive social influences they entail; meddling in international strifes, till latterly the surrounding powers preponderated too heavily; disunited and normally jealous of each other, even when dynastically united, through stress of crude patriotic prejudice and lack of political science; frequently retrograding, yet in the end steadily progressing in such science as well as in general culture and well-being. Losses of territory--as Finland and Schleswig-Holstein--at the hands of stronger rivals, and the violent experiences and transitions of the Napoleonic period, have left them on a relatively stable and safe basis, albeit still mutually jealous and unable to pa.s.s beyond the normal monarchic stage. To-day their culture is that of all the higher civilisations, as are their social problems.
-- 4
In the history of Scandinavian culture, however, lie some special ill.u.s.trations of sociological law. The remarkable fact that the first great development of old Norse literature occurred in the poor and remote colonial settlement of Iceland is significant of much. To the retrospective yearning of an exiled people, the desire to preserve every memory of the old life in the fatherland, is to be attributed the grounding of the saga-cult in Iceland; and the natural conditions, enforcing long spells of winter leisure, greatly furthered the movement.
But the finest growth of the new literature, it turns out, is due to culture-contacts--an unexpected confirmation, in a most unlikely quarter, of a general principle arrived at on other data. The vigilant study of our own day has detected, standing out from the early Icelandic literature, "a group of poems which possess the very qualities of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, pa.s.sionate dramatic power, and n.o.ble simplicity of language, which [other] Icelandic poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at all. They are the poetry of the 'Western Islands'"[688]--that is, the poetry of the meeting and mixing of the "Celtic" and Scandinavian stocks in Ireland and the Hebrides--the former already much mixed, and proportionally rich in intellectual variations. It was in this area that "a magnificent school of poetry arose, to which we owe works that for power and beauty can be paralleled in no Teutonic language till centuries after their date.... This school, which is totally distinct from the Icelandic, ran its own course apart and perished before the thirteenth century."[689]
Compare Messrs. Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poetic.u.m Boreale_, 1883, vol. i, Introd. pp. lxii, lxiii; and, as regards the old Irish civilisation, the author's _Saxon and Celt_, pp. 127, 128, 131-33.
The theory of Celtic influence, though established in its essentials, is not perfectly consistent as set forth in the _Britannica_ article. Thus, while the Celticised literature is remarked for "n.o.ble simplicity of language," the true Icelandic, primarily like the Old English, is said to develop a "complexity of structure and ornament, an elaborate mythological and enigmatical phraseology, and a regularity of rhyme, a.s.sonance, luxuriance, quant.i.ty, and syllabification which it caught up from the Latin and _Celtic_ poets." Further, while the Celticised school is described as "totally distinct from the Icelandic," Celtic influence is also specified as affecting Norse literature in general. The first generations of Icelandic poets were men of good birth, "nearly always, too, of Celtic blood on one side at least"; and they went to Norway or Denmark, where they lived as kings' or chiefs'
henchmen. The immigration of Norse settlers from Ireland, too, affected the Iceland stock very early. "It is to the west that the best sagas belong: it is to the west that nearly every cla.s.sic writer whose name we know belongs; and it is precisely in the west that the admixture of Irish blood is greatest" (_ib._). The facts seem decisive, and the statements above cited appear the more clearly to need modification. It is to be noted that Schweitzer's _Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_ gives no hint of the Celtic influence.
But the Icelandic civilisation as a whole could not indefinitely progress on its own basis any more than the Irish. Beyond a certain point both needed new light and leading; for the primeval spirit of strife never spontaneously weakened; the original Icelandic stock being, to begin with, a selection of revolters from over-rule. So continual domestic feuds checked mental evolution in Iceland as in old Scandinavia; and the reduction of the island to Norwegian rule in the thirteenth century could not do more for it than monarchy was doing for Norway. Mere Christianity without progressive conditions of culture availed less for imaginative art than free paganism had done; and when higher culture-contacts became possible, the extreme poverty of Iceland tended more than ever to send the enterprising people where the culture and comfort were. It is in fact not a possible seat for a relatively flourishing civilisation in the period of peaceful development. The Reformation seems there to have availed for very little indeed. It was vehemently resisted,[690] but carried by the preponderant acquisitive forces: "nearly all who took part in it were men of low type, moved by personal motives rather than religious zeal."[691] "The glebes and hospital lands were a fresh power in the hands of the crown, and the subservient Lutheran clergy became the most powerful cla.s.s in the island; while the bad system of underleasing at rack-rent and short lease with unsecured tenant-right extended in this way over at least a quarter of the better land, stopping any possible progress." For the rest, "the Reformation had produced a real poet [Hallgrim Petersen], but the material rise of Iceland"--that is, the recent improvements in the condition of the people--"has not yet done so,"[692] though poetry is still cultivated in Iceland very much as music is elsewhere.
Thus this one little community may be said to have reached the limits of its evolution, as compared with others, simply because of the strait natural conditions in which its lot was cast. But to think of it as a tragically moribund organism is merely to proceed upon the old hallucinations of race-consciousness. Men reared in Iceland have done their part in making European civilisation, entering the more southerly Scandinavian stocks as these entered the stocks of western Europe; and the present population, who are a remnant, have no more cause to hang their heads than any family that happens to have few members or to have missed wealth. Failure is relative only to pretension or purpose.
The modern revival of Scandinavian culture, as must needs be, is the outcome of all the European influences. At the close of the sixteenth century, in more or less friendly intercourse with the other Protestant countries of north Europe, Denmark began effectively to develop a literature such as theirs, imaginative and scientific, in the vernacular as well as in Latin; and so the development went on while Sweden was gaining military glory with little enlightenment. Then a rash attack upon Sweden ended in a loss of some of the richest Danish provinces (1658); whereafter a sudden parliamentary revolution, wrought by a league of king and people against the aristocracy, created not a const.i.tutional but an absolute and hereditary monarchy (1660), enthroning divine right at the same instant in Denmark and Norway as in England. Thereafter, deprived of their old posts and subjected to ruinous taxes, the n.o.bility fell rapidly into poverty;[693] and the merchant cla.s.s, equally overtaxed, withdrew their capital; the peasantry all the while remaining in a state of serfdom.[694] Then came a new series of wars with Sweden, recurring through generations, arresting, it is said, literature, law, philosophy, and medicine,[695] but not the natural sciences, then so much in evidence elsewhere: Tycho Brahe being followed in astronomy by Horrebow, while chemistry, mathematics, and even anatomy made progress. But to this period belongs the brilliant dramatist and historian Holberg, the first great man of letters in modern Scandinavia (d. 1754); and in the latter half of the eighteenth century the two years of ascendency of the freethinking physician Struensee as queen's favourite (1770-72) served partially to emanc.i.p.ate the peasants, establish religious toleration, abolish torture, and reform the administration. Nor did his speedy overthrow and execution wholly undo his main work,[696] which outdid that of many generations of the old regime. Still, the history of his rise and fall, his vehement speed of reconstruction and the ruinous resistance it set up, is one of the most dramatic of the many warnings of history against thinking suddenly to elevate a nation by reforms imposed wholly from without.[697]
Thenceforward, with such fluctuations as mark all culture-history, the Scandinavian world has progressed mentally nearly step for step with the rest of Europe, producing scholars, historians, men of science, artists, and imaginative writers in more than due proportion. Many names which stand for solid achievement in the little-read Scandinavian tongues are unknown save to specialists elsewhere; but those of Holberg, Linnaeus, Malte-Brun, Rask, Niebuhr, Madvig, Oehlenschlager, Thorwaldsen, and Swedenborg tell of a comprehensive influence on the thought and culture of Europe during a hundred years in which Europe was being reborn; and in our own day some of the greatest imaginative literature of the modern world comes from Norway, long the most backward of the group. Ibsen, one of a notable company of masters, stood at the head of the drama of the nineteenth century; and the society which sustained him, however he may have satirised it, is certificated abreast of its age.
-- 5
In one aspect the Scandinavian polities have a special lesson for the larger nations. They have perforce been specially exercised latterly, as of old, by the problem of population; and in Norway there was formerly made one of the notable, if not one of the best, approaches to a practical solution of it. Malthus long ago[698] noted the Norwegian marriage-rate as the lowest in Europe save that of Switzerland; and he expressed the belief that in his day Norway was "almost the only country in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehension expressed of a redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower cla.s.ses of people is in some degree seen and understood."[699] This state of things having long subsisted, there is a presumption that it persists uninterruptedly from pagan times, when, as we have seen, there existed a deliberate population-policy; for Christian habits of mind can nowhere be seen to have set up such a tendency, and it would be hard to show in the history of Norway any great political change which might effect a rapid revolution in the domestic habits of the peasantry, such as occurred in France after the Revolution. Broadly speaking, the ma.s.s of the Norwegian people had till the last century continued to live under those external or domiciliary restraints on multiplication which were normal in rural Europe in the Middle Ages, and which elsewhere have been removed by industrialism; yet without suffering latterly from a continuance of the severer medieval destructive checks. They must, therefore, have put a high degree of restraint on marriage, and probably observed parental prudence in addition.
When it is found that in Sweden, where the conditions and usages were once similar, there was latterly at once less prudential restraint on marriage and population, and a lower standard of material well-being, the two cases are seen to furnish a kind of _experimentum crucis_. The comparatively late maintenance of a powerful military system in Sweden having there prolonged the methods of aristocratic and bureaucratic control while they were being modified in Denmark-Norway, Swedish population in the eighteenth century was subject to artificial stimulus.
From about the year 1748, the Government set itself, on the ordinary empirical principle of militarism, to encourage population.[700] Among its measures were the variously wise ones of establishing medical colleges and lying-in and foundling hospitals, the absolute freeing of the internal trade in grain, and the withdrawal in 1748 of an old law limiting the number of persons allowed to each farm. The purpose of that law had been to stimulate population by spreading tillage; but the spare soil being too unattractive, the young people emigrated. On the law being abolished, population did increase considerably, rising between 1751 and 1800 from 1,785,727 to 2,347,308,[701] though some severe famines had occurred within the period. But in the year 1799, when Malthus visited the country, the increased population suffered from famine very severely indeed, living mainly and miserably on bark bread.[702] It was one of Malthus's great object-lessons in his science.
On one side a poor country was artificially over-populated; on the other, the people of Norway, an even poorer country, directly and indirectly[703] restrained their rate of increase, while the Government during a long period wrought to the same end by the adjustment of its military system and by making a certificate of earning power or income necessary for all marriages.[704] The result was that, save in the fishing districts, where speculative conditions encouraged early marriages and large families, the Norwegian population were better off than the Swedish.[705]
Already in Malthus' youth the Norwegian-Danish policy had been altered, all legal and military restrictions on marriage having been withdrawn; and he notes that fears were expressed as to the probable results. It is one of his shortcomings to have entirely abstained from subsequent investigation of the subject; and in his late addendum as to the state of Sweden in 1826 he further fails to note that as a result of a creation there after 1803 of 6,000 new farms from land formerly waste, the country ceased to need to import corn and was able to export a surplus.[706] It still held good, however, that the Norwegian population, being from persistence of prudential habit[707] much the slower in its rate of increase, had the higher standard of comfort, despite much spread of education in Sweden.
Within the past half-century the general development of commerce and of industry has tended broadly to equalise the condition of the Scandinavian peoples. As late as 1835 a scarcity would suffice to drive the Norwegian peasantry to the old subsistence of bark bread, a ruinous resort, seeing that it destroyed mult.i.tudes of trees of which the value, could the timber have found a market, would have far exceeded that of a quant.i.ty of flour yielding much more and better food. At that period the British market was closed by duties imposed in the interest of the Canadian timber trade.[708] Since the establishment of British free trade, Norwegian timber has become a new source of wealth; and through this and other and earlier commercial developments prudential family habits were affected. Thus, whereas the population of Sweden had all but doubled between 1800 and 1880, the population of Norway had grown even faster.[709] And whereas in 1834 the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate births in Stockholm was 1 to 2.26[710] (one of the results of foundling hospitals, apparently), in 1890 the total Swedish rate was slightly below 1 to 10, while in Norway it was 1 to 14. The modern facilities for emigration have further affected conjugal habits.
Latterly, however, there are evidences of a new growth of intelligent control.
In recent years the statistics of emigration and population tell a fairly plain story. In Norway and Sweden alike the excess of births over deaths reached nearly its highest in 1887, the figures being 63,942 for Sweden and 29,233 for Norway. In 1887, however, emigration was about its maximum in both countries, 50,786 leaving Sweden and 20,706 leaving Norway. Thereafter the birth-rate rapidly fell, and the emigration, though fluctuating, has never again risen in Sweden to the volume of 1887-88, though it has in Norway. But when, after falling to 43,728 in 1892, the excess of Swedish births over deaths rises to 60,231 in 1895, while the emigration falls from 45,000 in 1892 to 13,000 in 1894, it is clear that the lesson of regulation is still very imperfectly learned.
Norway shows the same fluctuations, the excess of births rising from 23,600 in 1892 to nearly 32,000 in 1896, and again from 27,685 in 1908 to 29,804 in 1909, doubtless because of ups and downs in the harvests, as shown in the increase of marriages from 12,742 in 1892 to 13,962 in 1896.
In Denmark the progression has been similar. There the excess of births over deaths was so far at its maximum in 1886, the figures being 29,986 in a population of a little over 2,000,000; whereafter they slowly decreased, till in 1893 the excess was only 26,235. All the while emigration was active, gradually rising from 4,346 in 1885 to 10,382 in 1891; then again falling to 2,876 in 1896, when the surplus of births over deaths was 34,181--a development sure to force more emigration. In 1911 the population was 2,775,076--a rapid rise; and in 1910 the surplus of births over deaths was 40,110. The Scandinavians are thus still in the unstable progressive stage of popular well-being, though probably suffering less from it than either Germany or England.
Here, then, is a group of kindred peoples apparently at least as capable of reaching a solution of the social problem as any other, and visibly prospering materially and morally in proportion as they bring reason to bear on the vital lines of conduct, though still in the stage of curing over-population by emigration. Given continued peaceful political evolution in the direction first of democratic federation, and further of socialisation of wealth, they may reach and keep the front rank in civilisation, while the more unmanageably large communities face risks of dire vicissitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 638: As in Carlyle's _Early Kings of Norway_, the _caput mortuum_ of his historical method. Much more instructive works on Scandinavian history are available to the English reader. The two volumes on _Scandinavia_ by Crichton and Wheaton (1837) are not yet superseded, though savouring strongly of the conservatism of their period. Dunham, who rapidly produced, for Gardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia series, histories of _Spain and Portugal_ (5 vols.), _Europe during the Middle Ages_ (4 vols.), and the _Germanic Empire_ (3 vols.), compiled also one of _Denmark, Sweden, and Norway_ (3 vols. 1839-40), of inferior quality. But Geijer's _History of Sweden_, one of the standard modern national histories of Europe, is translated into English as far as the period of Gustavus Vasa (3 vols. of orig. in one of trans. 1845); and the competent _History of Denmark_ by C.-F. Allen is available in a French translation (Copenhagen, 2 tom. 1878). Otte's _Scandinavian History_, 1874, is an unpretending and unliterary but well-informed work, which may be used to check Crichton and Wheaton. The more recent work of Mr. R. Nisbet Bain, _Scandinavia: a Political History of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from 1513 to 1900_ (Camb. Univ. Press, 1905), is useful for the period covered, but has little sociological value. For the history of ancient Scandinavian literature, the introduction to Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poetic.u.m Boreale_ (1883), and Prof. Powell's article on Icelandic Literature in the 10th ed. of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, are preferable to Schweitzer's _Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_ (1886, 2 Bde.), which, however, is useful for the modern period.]
[Footnote 639: See Geijer's _History of the Swedes_, Eng. tr. of pt. i, 1-vol. ed. p. 30, as to the special persistence in Scandinavia of the early religious conception of kingship. Cp. Crichton and Wheaton's _Scandinavia_, 1837, i, 157.]
[Footnote 640: Such New Testament pa.s.sages as _Rom._ xiii, 1-7, and _t.i.tus_ iii, 1, seem to have been penned or interpolated expressly to propitiate the Roman government.]
[Footnote 641: It was by entirely overlooking this historic fact that M.
Fustel de Coulanges, in the last chapter of his _Cite antique_, was able to propound a theory of historic Christianity as something extra-political. He there renounced the inductive method for a pure ecclesiastical apriorism, and the result is a very comprehensive sociological misconception.]
[Footnote 642: Geijer, pp. 31, 33; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 102, 104, 183, 184.]
[Footnote 643: Tacitus, _Germania_, cc. 7, 11.]
[Footnote 644: Cp. Zschokke, _Des Schweizerlands Geschichte_, c. 7, as to the psychological effect of an organised worship in a great building on heathens without any such centre. And see the frank admission of J.R.
Green, _Short History_, p. 54, that among the Anglo-Saxons "religion had told against political independence."]
[Footnote 645: Cp. C.F. Allen, _History of Denmark_, French tr., Copenhagen, 1878, i, 55, 56.]
[Footnote 646: Crichton and Wheaton, _Scandinavia_, i, 129-32; Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, p. 115. Knut was a great supporter of missionaries. Hardwick attributes to Gorm a "bitter hatred" of the Church, and also "violence," but gives no details.]
[Footnote 647: Even Svend is said to have laboured for Christianity in his latter years--another suggestion that it was found to answer monarchic purposes. See Hardwick, p. 115, _note 9_.]
[Footnote 648: Cp. Dasent, Introd. to _The Burnt Njal_, p. ix.]
[Footnote 649: Hardwick, as cited, p. 117.]
[Footnote 650: Hardwick, as cited.]
[Footnote 651: A warlike priest of Bremen is said to have converted him in Germany; and he was baptised in the Scilly Islands, which he had visited on a piratical expedition. Finally he was confirmed in England, which he promised to treat in future as a friendly State. (_Id._ _ib._)]
[Footnote 652: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 151.]
[Footnote 653: Cp. Hardwick. p. 118, _note 3_.]
[Footnote 654: Though this was often of the most brutal description, there were some comparatively "mild-mannered" pirates, who rarely "cut a throat or scuttled ship." See C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, i, 21.]
[Footnote 655: Geijer, _History of Sweden_, Eng. tr. p. 31.]
[Footnote 656: It is actually on record that the practice long subsisted in Iceland, despite the efforts of St. Olaf to suppress it. Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, p. 119, _note_, citing Torfaens, _Hist.
Norveg._ ii, 2, and Neander. Among the Slavonic Pomeranians in the twelfth century it was still common to destroy female children at birth.
_Id._ p. 224, _note_.]
[Footnote 657: Cp. C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, Fr. tr. 1878, i, 20.]
[Footnote 658: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que l'Angleterre? Une colonie francais mal tournee."]