The Sun.
London, England, 1864-02-12 00:00:00

THE SCHLES WIG-HOLSTEIN WAR.

We (limes) make the following extracts from
the letters of an esteemed correspondent, whom we
despatched to Denmark immediately upon the out-
break of the war, but whose communications have
been delayed by the stoppage of the post from Den-
mark through Germany, and have now only come
to hand by a circuitous route.
" COPENHAGEN, Jan. 30.
" Oa one point I find the most perfect unanimity
among the people I converse with. They will not
give up their position in Schleswig till they have
exhausted all their means to hold it. To what ex-
tent it may be expedient from strategical conside-
rations to fall back from the line of the Eider canal,
and perhaps from Rendsbarg and Eckernforde, is a
matter to be left to the judgment of military
authorities.; but the Danes would as soon dream
or giving up Zealand and Copenhagen itself as of
yielding Schleswig on the mere hope of recovering
it by negotiation. Their very existence as a State
and a nation is, they contend, bound up with their
gigantic stronghold on the Eider.
" While they turn all their efforts towards the
vindication of their rights by might of arms, the
Danes are also extremely anxious to make those very
rights the theme of endless argument. I have heard
all that is and all that may be said on the:subject of
this irksome Schleswig-Holstein question—all that
is said both by German and Dane—and I become
daily more and more strongly convinced, not only
that there is a certain amount of right and reason
on both sides, but also that each of the parties can
in a quiet moment be brought to do justice to its
adversary, and to acknowledge the soundness and
correctness of the very facts which are brought to
bear against its own interests. Only there is, as
may be expected, an immense deal of exasperation
between the disputants. The mutual charge of
deliberate falsehood and duplicity is lavishly dealt
out hither and thither, and while a Dane reddens
with passion on a stranger merely happening to
mention the names of Schleswig and Holstein in
the same breath, a German thinks he has set the
question at rest if he calls the territory in dispute
not Schleswig Holstein—not even Scleswig-Hol-
stein, but plainly Schleswigholstein,flatteriz3g him-
self that by the fusion of the two names in one word
and the removal of the obnoxious capital letter he
has demonstrated the indivisibility of the Two-and-
One Duchies to the world's satisfaction

" All this is merely childish, but if you come to
more serious inquiries you find, for instance, that
the Danes—those who are fair and rational among
them, at lees—by no means insist upon the illegi-
timacy of Prince Frederick of Augustenburg, or
upon the morganatic nature of his father's mar-
riage, which would deter him from all right to
the paternal inheritance. That marriage was most
assuredly a 2nesalliance, and as such it would be
nonsidered only semi-legitimate in a German feudal
Court, but it was acknowledged as valid by the then
King of Denmark, and the Prince would not there-
fore have his rights of succession challenged in this
country, and merely on that ground. Likewise the
_Danes are not quite sure that the father's renuncia-
tion would altogether be binding upon his offspring.
But they contend that no protest was entered
by Prince Frederick against his father's deed
until about two years ago, although the Prince has
been of age for the last 14 years at least, and
although, by living with his father, he has received

and enjoyed his own share of that consideration, o:
that mess of potage of which the Duke of Augusten.
burg sold his birthright. They add that both father
and son were in 1848-9 in arms against their lawful
Sovereign and country, and that, as guilty of high
'treason, they would have forfeited their right to
their property, so that the 3,000,000 rigsdalers
which they then accepted were in consideration for
their abdicated rights, not for their ceded estates ;
that, after all, even supposing that Prince Frederick
was not legally bound by his father's act, the moral
obligation arising from long acquiescence and from
the solidarity of domestic interests ought to deter
him from preferring his claims at the present
moment.
" AU this as to mere rights. For what concerns the
exigencies of a mixed nationality in Schleswig, the
Danes allow that, taking the test of mere language,
there are, or there were before 1858, 150,000 persons
in the duchy who spoke German, and 45,000 whose
idicm was mixed, besides about 30,000 Frisians,
leaving 170,000 who were indisputably Danes by
their tongue. Admitting there facts, and enumera-
ting with great minuteness the towns and districts
in which the different nationalities prevailed, the
Danes contend that all their institutions, adminis-
trative, judicial, ecclesiastical, and educational,
had been framed with such nicety and punctilous-
ness that the purely German or purely Danish dis-
tricts were allowed the fullest possible enjoyment of
their respective tongues, while in the mixed districts
the Government invariably in all its acts made use
of bath languages, and allowed each individual the
choice of his own language—to such an extent, in-
deed, that, ' in the event of a judgment being referred
to the decision of the Crown, the case was argued
before the King's Council in the same language in
which it was given.'
"At the same time that I willingly believe all this
to be perfectly true, I also incline to admit that
there may have been some ground in the complaint
of the Germans that their nationality was unfairly
dealt with in the mixed districts, especially for what
concerns the schools and churches, for you really
come to localities in which the two races, or, if you
prefer, the two idioms, arc so thoroughly blended
that it becomes next to impossible to establish a
strict and correct line of demarcation ; and there are
persons thoroughly at home in both languages, who
do not hesitate to declare now for the one, now for
the other, according as interest, subserviency, spirit
of contradiction, or even mere whim prompts them.
"That the Danes should at all times have been
anxious to number as many of their people in
Schleswig as by any strain of ingenuity they could
contrive was but too natural. That duchy and the
frontier of the Eider were and are held by them as
essential to the existence of their monarchy and
their nation. They had for a long time been in-
different to the silent and peaceful, but incessant,
encroachment of the expansive German nationality;
and the time was, in the palmy days of German
learning and culture, when not only Schleswig, but
the whole of Denmark Proper, was being rapidly
Germanized; but now, when intellectual and moral
ascendancy become the pretext for political absorp-
tion—now that Denmark has put forth a glorious
literature and civilisation of her own—a reaction
against German
ism was inevitable, and all political
engines were yet to work to regain the ground that
had been unwittingly lost.
The Danes conclude all their arguments with a
strong assertion that they
to and country
like Denmark,
must either be masters
of Schleswig, or themselves cease to be. What is
the element of 150,000 or even 200,000 people of
mixed or doubtful race to a. nation of 40,000,000,
like Germany,' they say, if it in the scale
against the very existence of a nation
already dwindled
down to
nothing the
narrowest proportions ? Schleswig is
Prussia, to Austria, or the
German Diet; it is
all in all to Denmark. Where is there in the
world a nation, be it France, Italy, or Spain,
some of whose people have not been and are not
sacrificed to the exigencies of political arrange-
ments end of frontier security ? Are not the
Ticino people Italians, and the Genevese French,
and the inhabitants of Berne and Zurich Germans?
Ought Switzerland to be blotted out of the list of
nations to give her neighbours all they could claim
on the score of mere language ? Or is it because
Denmark is weak that a different weight and mea-
sure should be applied
.in her case, and a treatment
put upon her with which no other country would
put u;
If so, the whole matter is reduced to
•
mere question of force, and the Danes will yet show
that they arc not so helplessly at the mercy of their
enemies as ',hese latter were too hastily led to sup-

pose.
"'The Germans acknowledge the justice of all
these pleadings, and they conclude that Denmark
has no longer a right of existence ; that it has in
reality already ceased to axiat ; and ,the should con-
sent to a partition which, while giving Schleswig as
well as Holstein to Germany, should juin the other
provinces of the kingdom to Sweden, But this
question of a fusion of the Scandinavian races is a
complex one, find it would be worth while to inquire

what the Danes, the Swedes, and all the rest of
Europe have to say to it. I shall touch on that
subject in a subsequent letter.

" SAN. 31,

"The conviction that diplomatic interference can
do nothing for them, that the stru4gle is both in-
evitable and imminent, and that they will have to
bear the brunt of it alone, gains strength among
the Danes. There is a strong party here, indeed,
who have faith in the Swedes, and expect to see
these Northern allies coming to the rescue at the
aleventh hour, These sanguine people belong to
what is called the Scandinavian Party,' a set of
men who cherish the notion of a union of the three
Northern kingdoms under one sceptre, and think
the present straits of Denmark most likely to
call forth such sympathies on the part of their
Swedish and Norwegian brethren as may hasten
this, to them, most auspicious combination. This
party has its main strength among the well-educated
and strictly national party, and rallies, I am told,
round the Swedish Ministry, Count Hamilton, a
gentleman of ancient Scottish descent, a personage
of the highest distinction in his own country, and
enjoying the highest reputation in this. These par-
tisans of what one might call ' young Scandinavia,'
evince the most profound respect for the memory
of the departed King, because he was a Dane,' a
reflection upon the present Monarch, who is almost
a stranger in the country, and whose strong German
accent when he speaks Danish grates most un-
pleasantly upon the nerves of tho more fastidious
part of his subjects.
" A Scandinavian kingdom in the North of Europe,
a German Empire in the centre, with Switzerland
and Italy in the South, would, these people con-
ceive, constitute such a strong line of natural allies
as would best check the restless ambition of France
on one side, and the towering might of encroaching
Russia on the other. With a view to some such
future arrangement, these Scandinavians would be
fain to meet the Germans half-way, so far at least as
to give up Holstein altogether, retaining the Eider
as the natural frontier of the Northern kingdom.
On the other hand, however, there is a set of more
thorough and uncompromising Danish patriots who
cannot dissociate the love they bear to their country
from the duty they owe to their King, and to these
the project of a united Scandinavian kingdom ap-
pears not only a disloyal and treasonable scheme,
but a mad, impracticable dream, against which, they
say, all the bloody traditions of the past, all the
present antipathies of the lower classes of Swedes
and Danes, and all the interests of the great Powers,
chiefly of England and Russia, would be arrayed.
These are of opinion, not only that Denmark should
continue to exist, but that it should remain as it is,
or was, and are loth to listen to any proposal not
only as to the cession of any part of Schleswig, but
even as to the burrender of Holstein. The bounda-
ries of the Danish Peninsula, to their mind, were
traced by nature at the Elbe ; Denmark should fight
for the whole of it to the last drop of her blood.
Time enough to surrender to hard necessity what
may be lost after a decisive defeat ; but so long as
the strength of the monarchy is unbroken to talk
of concessions, of new combinations, of the extinc-
tion of a nation which boasts so many centuries of
glorious history, is a wickedness hardly to be ex-
cused on the ground of insanity.
" Such, I believe, are the different feelings with
which the various parties of this brave Danish
people are about to meet their German foes in the
field. This divergence of opinion, I need hardly
add, is purely theoretical and speculative. Practi-
cally, the Danes will no less be of one mind as to
their duty to their country and Sovereign. Even
those who would wish to come to terms with Ger-
many by the sacrifice of Holstein are most unshaken
in their determination not to give up one inch
of Schleswig territory. Schleswig is an integra
part of Denmark, and were it even desirable and
possible to join Denmark in one great Northern
State, it would surely be bad policy, the ' Scandi-
navians' think, to give up the Danish bride's
dowry, or part of her dowry, at the very moment
of her contemplated wedding with her Swedish
bridegroom.