DENMARK AND THE DANES 



131 



Ewing Galloway 



WHERE POTTERY-MAKING IS A FINE ART 



Women decorate the pottery in the beautiful studios of the Royal Copenhagen works. Each 

 piece of porcelain is decorated by hand and the ware has never been commercialized. 



is an instrument, a medium of circulation. 

 And the object for which all parties in 

 politics are struggling — the conservative in 

 Denmark would be looked on as radical 

 here — is that it should be equally dis- 

 tributed, not for luxuries, but for neces- 

 saries. 



Other countries have begun to imitate 

 the admirable system of farmers' banks, 

 and the success that Sir Horace Plunkett 

 has had in Ireland — a success which 

 would have been greater if the Irish peo- 

 ple had the capacity, as the Danes have, 

 for team-work — owes most of its value 

 to his careful study of the agricultural 

 cooperative processes in Denmark. 



The first Irish technical report on agri- 

 cultural cooperative conditions in Den- 

 mark is a model for serious study, and 

 time has not dulled its applicability. 



Prussia despoiled Denmark in 1864; 

 and while Imperial Germany grew more 

 threatening to the liberty of Denmark 

 every year until the close of the World 

 War, the Danes were not hampered in 

 any way, as the Irish were, by foreign 

 control; consequently they had not the 

 same temptation to emigrate. With some 



exceptions, they remained in their own 

 country. 



THE DANES A PROUD AND PATRIOTIC 

 RACE 



About the middle of the nineteenth 

 century the Danish people, if they had 

 had less love of their own land and less 

 power of cohesion, would have deserted 

 Denmark. Everything seemed to be 

 against them. Serfdom had ceased, it is 

 true, and the dawn of social equality was 

 beginning. 



But they had not yet recovered from 

 the blow struck at their national pride 

 early in the nineteenth century, when 

 their fleets had been destroyed by the 

 British. Yet this was as nothing com- 

 pared with the tearing away of their most 

 cherished province, Schleswig-Holstein, 

 by the Prussians, assisted by the Aus- 

 trians, in 1864. 



The Danes had desired to conquer no 

 other nation ; their only wish was that 

 they should retain their own language, 

 their own literature, their own music and 

 art — in a word, their national "culture." 



Their religion was never in danger, 



