HOW FREEDOM GROWS IN DENMARK.
Compared with Ireland, India, or Turkey, DENMARK is a very poor
country. She has, says one of the most enlightened of modern British
travellers--
"No metals or minerals, no fire power, no water power, no products or
capabilities for becoming a manufacturing country supplying foreign
consumers. She has no harbours on the North Sea. Her navigation is
naturally confined to the Baltic. Her commerce is naturally confined
to the home consumption of the necessaries and luxuries of civilized
life, which the export of her corn and other agricultural products
enables her to import and consume. She stands alone in her corner of
the world, exchanging her loaf of bread, which she can spare, for
articles she cannot provide for herself, but still providing for
herself every thing she can by her own industry."[182]
That industry is protected by heavy import duties, and those duties
are avowedly imposed with the view of enabling the farmer everywhere
to have the artisan at his side; thus bringing together the producers
and the consumers of the earth. "The greater part of their clothing
materials," says Mr. Laing--
"Linen, mixed linen and cotton, and woollen cloth, is home-made; and
the materials to be worked up, the cotton yarns, dye stuffs, and
utensils, are what they require from the shops. The flax and wool are
grown and manufactured on the peasant's farm; the spinning and
weaving done in the house; the bleaching, dyeing, fulling done at
home or in the village." * * * "Bunches of ribbons, silver clasps,
gold ear-rings, and other ornaments of some value, are profusely used
in many of the female dresses, although the main material is
home-made woollen and linen. Some of these female peasant costumes
are very becoming when exhibited in silk, fine cloth, and lace, as
they are worn by handsome country girls, daughters of rich peasant
proprietors in the islands, who sometimes visit Copenhagen. They have
often the air and appearance of ladies, and in fact are so in
education, in their easy or even wealthy circumstances, and an
inherited superiority over others of the same class." * * * "In a
large country-church at Gettorf, my own coat and the minister's were,
as far as I could observe, the only two in the congregation not of
home-made cloth; and in Copenhagen the working and every-day clothes
of respectable tradesmen and people of the middle class, and of all
the artisans and the lower labouring classes, are, if not home-made
and sent to them by their friends, at least country made; that is,
not factory made, but spun, woven, and sold in the web, by peasants,
who have more than they want for their family use, to small
shopkeepers. This is particularly the case with linen. Flax is a crop
on every farm; and the skutching, hackling, spinning, weaving, and
bleaching are carried on in every country family."--Pp. 381, 382,
383.
The manufacture of this clothing finds employment for almost the whole
female population of the country and for a large proportion of the
male population during the winter months. Under a different system,
the money price of this clothing would be less than it now is--as low,
perhaps, as it has been in Ireland--but what would be its labour
price? Cloth is cheap in that country, but man is so much cheaper that
he not only goes in rags, but perishes of starvation, because
compelled to exhaust his land and waste his labour. "Where," asks very
justly Mr. Laing--
"Would be the gain to the Danish nation, if the small proportion of
its numbers who do not live by husbandry got their shirts and jackets
and all other clothing one-half cheaper, and the great majority, who
now find winter employment in manufacturing their own clothing
materials, for the time and labour which are of no value to them at
that season, and can be turned to no account, were thrown idle by the
competition of the superior and cheaper products of machinery and the
factory?"--P. 385.
None! The only benefit derived by man from improvement in the
machinery of conversion is, that he is thereby enabled to give more
time, labour, and thought to the improvement of the earth, the great
machine of production; and in that there _can_ be no improvement under
a system that looks to the exportation of raw products, the sending
away of the soil, and the return of no manure to the land.
The whole Danish system tends to the local employment of both labour
and capital, and therefore to the growth of wealth and the division of
the land, and the improvement of the modes of cultivation. "With a
large and increasing proportion--
"Of the small farms belonging to peasant proprietors, working
themselves with hired labourers, and of a size to keep from five to
thirty or forty cows summer and winter, there are many large farms of
a size to keep from two hundred to three hundred, and even four
hundred cows, summer and winter, and let to verpachters, or large
tenant farmers, paying money rents. This class of verpachters are
farmers of great capital and skill, very intelligent and
enterprising, well acquainted with all modern improvements in
husbandry, using guano, tile-draining, pipe-draining, and likely to
be very formidable rivals in the English markets to the
old-fashioned, use-and-want English farmers, and even to most of our
improving large farmers in Scotland."--_Laing_, 52.
The system of this country has attracted instead of repelling
population, and with its growth there has been a constant and rapid
advance toward freedom. The class of verpachters above described
"Were originally strangers from Mecklenburg, Brunswick, and Hanover,
bred to the complicated arrangements and business of a great dairy
farm, and they are the best educated, most skilful, and most
successful farmers in the North of Europe. Many of them have
purchased large estates. The extensive farms they occupy, generally
on leases of nine years, are the domains and estates of the nobles,
which, before 1784, were cultivated by the serfs, who were, before
that period, _adscripti glebæ_, and who were bound to work every day,
without wages, on the main farm of the feudal lord, and had cottages
and land, on the outskirts of the estate, to work upon for their own
living when they were not wanted on the farm of the baron. Their
feudal lord could imprison them, flog them, reclaim them if they had
deserted from his land, and had complete feudal jurisdiction over
them in his baronial court."--P. 53.
It is, however, not only in land, but in various other modes, that the
little owner of capital is enabled to employ it with advantage. "The
first thing a Dane does with his savings," says Mr. Brown,[183]
British consul at Copenhagen--
"Is to purchase a clock; then a horse and cow, which he hires out,
and which pay good interest. Then his ambition is to become a petty
proprietor; and _this class of persons is better off than any in
Denmark_. Indeed, I know no people in any country who have more
easily within their reach all that is really necessary for life than
this class, which is very large in comparison with that of
labourers."
To the power advantageously to employ the small accumulations of the
labourer, it is due that the proportion of small proprietors has
become so wonderfully large. "The largest proportion of the country,
and of the best land of it," says Mr. Laing,[184] is in their hands--
"With farms of a size to keep ten or fifteen cows, and which they
cultivate by hired labour, along with the labour of the family. These
small proprietors, called huffner, probably from _hoff_, a
farm-steading and court-yard, correspond to the yeomen, small
freeholders, and statesmen, of the North of England, and many of them
are wealthy. Of this class of estates, it is reckoned there are about
125,150 in the two duchies: some of the huffners appear to be
copyholders, not freeholders; that is, they hold their land by
hereditary right, and may sell or dispose of it; but their land is
subject to certain fixed payments of money, labour, cartages,
ploughing yearly to the lord of the manor of which they hold it, or
to fixed fines for non-payment. A class of smaller land-holders are
called Innsters, and are properly cottars with a house, a yard, and
land for a cow or two, and pay a rent in money and in labour, and
receive wages, at a reduced rate, for their work all the year round.
They are equivalent to our class of married farm-servants, but with
the difference that they cannot be turned off at the will or
convenience of the verpachter, or large farmer, but hold of the
proprietor; and all the conditions under which they hold--sometimes
for life, sometimes for a term of years--are as fixed and supported
by law, as those between the proprietor and the verpachter. Of this
class there are about 67,710, and of house-cottars without land;
17,480, and 36,283 day-labourers in husbandry. The land is well
divided among a total population of only 662,500 souls."--P. 43.
Even the poorest of these labouring householders has a garden, some
land, and a cow;[185] and everywhere the eye and hand of the little
proprietor may be seen busily employed, while the larger farmers, says
our author--
"Attend our English cattle-shows and agricultural meetings, are
educated men, acquainted with every agricultural improvement, have
agricultural meetings and cattle-shows of their own, and publish the
transactions and essays of the members. They use guano, and all the
animal or chemical manures, have introduced tile-draining, machinery
for making pipes and tiles, and are no strangers to irrigation on
their old grass meadows."--P. 127.
As a natural consequence, the people are well clothed. "The
proportion," says Mr. Laing--
"Of well-dressed people in the streets is quite as great as in our
large towns; few are so shabby in clothes as the unemployed or
half-employed workmen and labourers in Edinburgh; and a proletarian
class, half-naked and in rags, is not to be seen. The supply of
clothing material for the middle and lower classes seems as great,
whether we look at the people themselves or at the second or third
rate class of shops with goods for their use."--P. 379.
In regard to house accommodation, he says:--
"The country people of Denmark and the duchies are well lodged. The
material is brick. The roofing is of thatch in the country, and of
tiles in the towns. Slate is unknown. The dwelling apartments are
always floored with wood. I have described in a former note the great
hall in which all the cattle and crops and wagons are housed, and
into which the dwelling apartments open. The accommodations outside
of the meanest cottage, the yard, garden, and offices, approach more
to the dwellings of the English than of the Scotch people of the same
class."--P. 420.
Every parish has its established schoolmaster, as well as
"Its established minister; but it appears to me that the class of
parochial schoolmasters here stands in a much higher position than,
in Scotland. They are better paid, their houses, glebes, and stipends
are better, relatively to the ordinary houses and incomes of the
middle class in country places, and they are men of much higher
education than their Scotch brethren." * * * "It is quite free to any
one who pleases to open a school; and to parents to send their
children to school or not, as they please. If the young people are
sufficiently instructed to receive confirmation from the clergyman,
or to stand an examination for admission as students at the
university, where or how they acquired their instruction is not
asked. Government has provided schools, and highly qualified and
well-paid teachers, but invests them with no monopoly of teaching, no
powers as a corporate body, and keeps them distinct from and
unconnected with the professional body in the university."--Pp. 170,
336.
"The most striking feature in the character of these small town
populations," says our author--
"And that which the traveller least expects to find in countries so
secluded, so removed from intercourse with other countries, by
situation and want of exchangeable products, as Sleswick, Jutland,
and the Danish islands, is the great diffusion of education,
literature, and literary tastes. In towns, for instance, of 6000
inhabitants, in England, we seldom find such establishments as the
6000 inhabitants of Aalborg, the most northerly town in Jutland,
possess. They enjoy, on the banks of the Lymfiord, a classical school
for the branches of learning required from students entering the
university; an educational institution, and six burger schools for
the ordinary branches of education, and in which the Lancastrian
method of mutual instruction is in use; a library of 12,000 volumes,
belonging to the province of Aalborg, is open to the public; a
circulating library of 2000 volumes; several private collections and
museums, to which access is readily given; a dramatic association,
acting every other Sunday; and two club-houses for balls and
concerts. A printing office and a newspaper, published weekly or
oftener, are, in such towns, establishments of course. Wyborg, the
most ancient town in Jutland, the capital in the time of the pagan
kings, and once a great city, with twelve parish churches and six
monasteries, but now containing no remains of its former grandeur,
and only about 3000 inhabitants, has its newspaper three times a
week, its classical school, its burger school, its public library,
circulating library, and its dramatic association acting six or eight
plays in the course of the winter. These, being county towns, the
seats of district courts and business, have, no doubt, more of such
establishments than the populations of the towns themselves could
support; but this indicates a wide diffusion of education and
intellectual tastes in the surrounding country. Randers, on the Guden
River, the only river of any length of course which runs into the
Baltic or Cattegat from the peninsular land, and the only one in
which salmon are caught, is not a provincial capital, and is only
about twenty-five English miles from the capital Wyborg; but it has,
for its 6000 inhabitants, a classical school, several burger schools;
one of which has above 300 children taught by the mutual-instruction
method, a book society, a musical society, a circulating library, a
printing press, a newspaper published three times a week, a
club-house, and a dramatic society. Aarhuus, with, about the same
population as Randers, and about the same distance from it as Randers
from Wyborg, has a high school, two burger schools, and a ragged or
poor school, a provincial library of 3000 or 4000 volumes, a school
library of about the same extent, a library belonging to a club, a
collection of minerals and shells belonging to the high schools, a
printing press, (from which a newspaper and a literary periodical are
issued,) book and music shops, a club-house, concert and ball-room,
and a dramatic society. Holstebro, a little inland town of about 800
inhabitants, about thirty-five English miles west from Wyborg, has
its burger school on the mutual-instruction system, its reading
society, and its agricultural society. In every little town in this
country, the traveller finds educational institutions and indications
of intellectual taste for reading, music, theatrical representations,
which, he cannot but admit, surpass what he finds at home in England,
in similar towns and among the same classes."--P.316.
We have here abundant evidence of the beneficial effect of local
action, as compared with centralisation. Instead of having great
establishments in Copenhagen, and no local schools, or newspapers,
there is everywhere provision for education, and evidence that the
people avail themselves of it. Their tastes are cultivated, and
becoming more so from day to day; and thus do they present a striking
contrast with the picture furnished by the opposite shore of the
German Ocean, and for the reason that there the system is based on the
idea of cheapening labour at home and underworking the labourer
abroad. The windows of the poorest houses, says Mr. Laing--
"Rarely want a bit of ornamental drapery, and are always decked with
flowers and plants in flower-pots. The people have a passion for
flowers. The peasant girl and village beau are adorned with bouquets
of the finest of ordinary flowers; and in the town you see people
buying, flowers who with us, in the same station, would think it
extravagance. The soil and climate favour this taste. In no part of
Europe are the ordinary garden-flowers produced in such abundance and
luxuriance as in Holstein and Sleswick."--P. 50.
The people have everywhere "leisure to be happy, amused, and
educated,"[186] and, as a consequence, the sale of books is large. The
number of circulating libraries is no less than six hundred,[187] and
their demands give
"More impulse to literary activity than appears in Edinburgh, where
literature is rather passive than active, and what is produced worth
publishing is generally sent to the London market. This is the reason
why a greater number of publications appear in the course of the year
in Copenhagen than in Edinburgh." * * * "The transmission of books
and other small parcels by post, which we think a great improvement,
as it unquestionably is, and peculiar to our English post-office
arrangement, is of old standing in Denmark, and is of great advantage
for the diffusion of knowledge, and of great convenience to the
people."--Pp. 373, 374.
The material and intellectual condition of this people is declared by
Mr. Laing--and he is an experienced and most observant traveller--to
be higher than that of any other in Europe;[188] while Mr. Kay, also
very high authority, places the people of England among the most
ignorant and helpless of those of Europe. The Danes consume more food
for the mind
"Than the Scotch; have more daily and weekly newspapers, and other
periodical works, in their metropolis and in their country towns, and
publish more translated and original works; have more public
libraries, larger libraries, and libraries more easily accessible to
persons of all classes, not only in Copenhagen, but in all provincial
and country towns; have more small circulating libraries, book-clubs,
musical associations, theatres and theatrical associations, and
original dramatic compositions; more museums, galleries, collections
of statues, paintings, antiquities, and objects gratifying to the
tastes of a refined and intellectual people, and open equally to all
classes, than the people of Scotland can produce in the length and
breadth of the land."--P. 390.
High moral condition is a necessary consequence of an elevated
material and intellectual one; and therefore it is that we find the
Dane distinguished for kindness, urbanity, and regard for others,[189]
and this is found in all portions of society. In visiting the Museum
of Northern Antiquities, which is open to the public, free of charge,
on certain days--
"The visitors are not left to gape in ignorance at what they see.
Professors of the highest attainments in antiquarian
science--Professor Thomsen, M. Worsaae, and others--men who, in fact,
have created a science out of an undigested mass of relics,
curiosities, and specimens, of the arts in the early ages--go round
with groups of the visitors, and explain equally to all, high and
low, with the greatest zeal, intelligence, and affability, the uses
of the articles exhibited, the state of the arts in the ages in which
they were used, the gradual progress of mankind from shells, stones,
and bones to bronze and iron, as the materials for tools, ornaments,
and weapons, and the conclusions made, and the grounds and reasons
for making them, in their antiquarian researches. They deliver, in
fact, an extempore lecture, intelligible to the peasant and
instructive to the philosopher."--P. 399.
In place of the wide gulf that divides the two great portions of
English society, we find here great equality of social intercourse,
and
"It seems not to be condescension merely on one side, and grateful
respect for being noticed at all on the other, but a feeling of
independence and mutual respect between individuals of the most
different stations and classes. This may be accounted for from wealth
not being so all-important as in our social state; its influence in
society is less where the majority are merely occupied in living
agreeably on what they have, without motive or desire to have
more."--P. 423.
How strikingly does the following contrast with the description of
London, and its hundred thousand people without a place to lay their
heads!--
"The streets are but poorly lighted, gas is not yet introduced, and
the police is an invisible force; yet one may walk at all hours
through this town without seeing a disorderly person, a man in liquor
unable to take care of himself, or a female street-walker. Every one
appears to have a home and bed of some kind, and the houseless are
unknown as a class."--P. 394.
Why this is so is, that, because of the growing improvement in the
condition of the people, the land is daily increasing in value, and is
becoming divided, and men are attracted from the city to the land and
the smaller towns--directly the reverse of what is observed in
England. "There is," says Mr. Laing--
"No such influx, as in our large towns, of operatives in every trade,
who, coming from the country to better their condition, are by far
too numerous for the demand, must take work at lower and lower wages
to keep themselves from starving, and who reduce their
fellow-craftsmen and themselves to equal misery. Employment is more
fixed and stationary for the employed and the employers. There is no
foreign trade or home consumption to occasion great and sudden
activity and expansion in manufactures, and equally great and sudden
stagnation and collapse."--P. 394.
"Drunkenness has almost," we are told, "disappeared from the Danish
character," and it is
"The education of the tastes for more refined amusements than the
counter of the gin-palace or the back parlour of the whisky-shop
afford, that has superseded the craving for the excitement of
spirituous liquor. The tea-gardens, concert-rooms, ball-rooms,
theatres, skittle-grounds, all frequented indiscriminately by the
highest and the lowest classes, have been the schools of useful
knowledge that have imparted to the lowest class something of the
manners and habits of the highest, and have eradicated drunkenness
and brutality, in ordinary intercourse, from the character of the
labouring people."--P. 396.
Denmark is, says this high authority, "a living evidence of the
falsity of the theory that population increases more rapidly than
subsistence where the land of the country is held by small working
proprietors;"[190] and she is a living evidence, too, of the falsity
of the theory that men commence with the cultivation of the most
productive soils, and find themselves, as wealth and population
increase, forced to resort to poorer ones, with diminished return to
labour. Why she is enabled to afford such conclusive evidence of this
is, that she pursues a policy tending to permit her people to have
that real free trade which consists in having the power to choose
between the foreign and domestic markets--a power, the exercise of
which is denied to India and Ireland, Portugal and Turkey. She desires
to exercise control over her own movements, and not over those of
others; and therefore it is that her people become from day to day
more free and her land from day to day more valuable.
Turkey is the paradise of the system commonly known by the name of
free trade--that system under which the artisan _is not permitted_ to
take his place by the side of the producer of silk and cotton--and the
consequence is, seen in the growing depopulation of the country, the
increasing poverty and slavery of its people, the worthlessness of its
land, and in the weakness of its government. Denmark, on the contrary,
is the paradise of the system supposed to be opposed to free
trade--that system under which the artisan and the farmer _are_
permitted to combine their efforts--and the consequence is seen in the
increase of population, in the growth of wealth and freedom, in the
growing value of land, in the increasing tendency to equality, and in
the strength of its government, as exhibited in its resistance of the
whole power of Northern Germany during the late Schleswig-Holstein
war, and as afterward exhibited toward those of its own subjects who
had aided in bringing on the war. "It is to the honour," says Mr.
Laing [191] --
"Of the Danish king and government, and it is a striking example of
the different progress of civilization in the North and in the South
of Europe, that during the three years this insurrection lasted, and
now that it is quelled, not one individual has been tried and put to
death, or in any way punished for a civil or political offence by
sentence of a court-martial, or of any other than the ordinary courts
of justice; not one life has been taken but in the field of battle,
and by the chance of war. Banishment for life has been the highest
punishment inflicted upon traitors who, as military officers
deserting their colours, breaking their oaths of fidelity, and giving
up important trusts to the enemy, would have been tried by
court-martial and shot in any other country. Civil functionaries who
had abused their official power, and turned it against the
government, were simply dismissed."
These facts contrast strikingly with those recently presented to view
by Irish history. Ireland had no friends in her recent attempt at
change of government. Her leaders had not even attempted to call in
the aid of other nations. They stood alone, and yet the English
government deemed it necessary to place them in an island at a
distance of many thousand miles, and to keep them there confined.
Denmark, on the contrary, was surrounded by enemies close at
hand--enemies that needed no ships for the invasion of her
territory--and yet she contented herself with simple banishment. The
policy of the former looks abroad, and therefore is it weak at home.
That of the latter looks homeward, and therefore is it that at home
she is strong; small as she is, compared with other powers, in her
territory and in the number of her population.