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
of giving up Zealand and Copenhagen itself as of
yielding Schleswig on the mere hope of recovering
it by negotiation. Their very existence as a Stag
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'eubject of
this irksome Schleswig-Holstein question—all that
is acid 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
leer 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
oat 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 Schles wig Holstein—not even Scieswig-Hol-
stein, bat plainly Schleswigholstein, flattering 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, bat if you come to
more serious inquiries you find, for instance, that
the Danes—those who are fair and rational among
them, at least—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 mesalliance, and as such it would be
considered 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 suecebsion 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, of
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.
" Aa 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
idiom was mixed, besides about 30,000 Frisians,
leaving 170,000 who were indisputably Danes by
their tongue. Admitting these 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 both languages, and allowed each individual the
choice of his own language—to such an extent, in-
deed, that,' in the event of a jadgment 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 I
come to localities in which the two races, or, if you
prefer, the two idioms, are so thoroughly blended
that it becomes next to impossible to establish a
strict and correct lino 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, subserNiency, 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-
tions-now that Denmark has put forth a glorious
literature and civilisation of her own—a reaction
against Germanism was inevitable, and all political
engines were set to work to regain the ground that
bad been unwittingly
lost.
"The Danes conclude
all their arguments with a
strong assertion that they must either be masters
of Schleswigor ,
---ernae,,
ves cease to be. ' What is
the element of 150,000 or even 200,000 people of
to a nation of 40,000,000,
mixed or doubtful race
like Germany,' they say, ;f
put in the scale
against the very existence of a nation and country
like Denmark, already dwindled down to the
narrowest proportions ? Schleswig ;a nothing to
Prussia, 1% to Austria, or the, German Diet ; it is
all in all to Denmark. here 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 exigeneies of political arrange-
ments and of frontier security ? Are not the
people Italians, and the Genevese French,
and the inhabitants of liJrne 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 up ? Ir so, the whole matter is reduced to a
mere question of force, and the Danes will yet show
that they are not so helplessly at the mercy of their
enemies as i.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 exist ; and she should con-
sent to a partition which, while giving Schleswig as
well as Holstein to Germany, should join the other
provinces of the kingdom to Svveden. But this
question of a fusion of the Scamlinavian races is a
complex one, and it would be worth while to inquire