THE LESSONS 



The account of my Danish experiences, or rather of 

 a selection of them, is now ended, and the question 

 arises What conclusions result ? What is there to 

 be learned from them ? In this book I have followed 

 the plan which I adopted in " Rural England," namely, 

 that of reporting quite fairly and as accurately as the 

 circumstances would allow, what I saw with my own 

 eyes and heard with my own ears. I should explain, 

 however, that as the use of a foreign language was 

 involved, the sense of which for the most part reached 

 me through an interpreter, mistakes may have arisen, 

 especially in names and figures. In the same way 

 documents of a technical character, from which some- 

 times I have been forced to drag the contents by help 

 of a dictionary, may not always have yielded up their 

 precise meaning. Difficulties will also occur where 

 every money value, every weight, area, and system 

 of measurement has to be translated into other values, 

 weights, areas, and systems. Still, after due allow- 

 ance is made for such obstacles, I think I may say 

 that what is set down in the foregoing pages can be 

 accepted as substantially correct. 



At any rate it has the merit of being entirely 

 uncoloured by any predilections that the author may 

 possess. It is an honest attempt to arrive at the 

 truth of the matters under examination, and amounts 

 in effect to a report upon them. 



But what is that truth ? Perhaps any reader who 



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