84 Bille—A History of the Danes in America. 
more attached to their native land than are their opponents. It is 
this very fact which accounts largely for the striking indiffer¬ 
ence with which Grundtvigianism is regarded by the Danes in 
America, while in Denmark it receives their strongest support. 
Yet in spite of the present weakness and past failures of the 
G-rundtvigians in this country, they have, nevertheless, exerted 
a decided influence on the Danes here, especially on those who 
have congregated in settlements. But this influence has been 
mostly of a negative character. For, though they could not be 
persuaded to support the Grundtvigian schools, they were quite 
easily persuaded from making any special effort to get an Eng¬ 
lish education. The fact that the minister was suspicious of 
the common school was quite a strong argument in the eye of 
the thrifty parent for keeping his boy at home to help on the 
farm instead of sending him to school, and on the whole from 
taking any special interest in the public school beyond that of 
keeping the expense of its maintenance as low as possible. 
The result to-day of this policy shows itself in a condition 
bordering very closely on illiteracy among a great number of 
young people who have grown up in the Danish settlements. 
They have failed to get a fair command of either the Danish or 
English language, because, as a rule, there was no parochial 
school to give the necessary instruction in Danish, and they did 
not avail themselves sufficiently of the advantages offered by the 
American schools to gain a mastery of the English. But the 
policy of slighting the English branches in the Grundtvigian 
high schools has had a more tangible, and if possible, a more 
detrimental influence on the life of the Danes in America. It 
has alienated the young Danish immigrants from the church 
and left them to shift for themselves in the acquiring of an 
English education, which usually meant a failure on their part 
to get such an education. They did not care and could not be 
made to care for the education offered them by the Grundtvig¬ 
ian high schools. Thus they were left out of touch with the 
church along a line on which it had the greatest opportunity 
for helping them and extending its influence over them. They 
could find no American school adapted to their needs, and though 
most of them were ambitious to master the English language 
