32 ORGANIZATION IN DENMARK 



surmounted the difficulty by inducing the King 

 to ratify " provisional budgets," and this was 

 done for a succession of years, to the increasing 

 dissatisfaction of the Liberal party, the members 

 of which were mostly small farmers in the 

 country districts, the large farmers and the 

 wholesale dealers belonging mainly to the Con- 

 servatives. 



The opportunity of the Liberals came in 

 1887, when Germany closed her ports to live 

 pigs from Denmark (owing to the fear of a 

 possible introduction of swine fever from that 

 country), and the Danish dealers had to think of 

 converting more of the pigs into bacon, and ex- 

 porting them in that form instead, mainly to 

 England, which had begun to be a buyer of 

 Danish bacon some years previously. The 

 Liberal farmers rose to the occasion, and said to 

 the Conservative dealers : " If you will not give 

 us our political rights we will not let you have 

 our pigs. We will start bacon-curing factories 

 on our own account." And this was just what 

 they did. They opened their first co-operative 

 bacon-curing establishment at Horsens, Jutland, 

 in 1887, more with the idea, as it would seem, 

 of spiting the Conservatives than for purely 

 commercial reasons ; but the scheme was soon 

 found to be well worth following up on its own 



