TITLES IN DENMARK. -
THE Radicals of Denmark, the only Radicals in Europe now in possession of a majority in one legislative Chamber, seem to be very badly led. They waste their force in silly tentatives dictated by doctrinaires. They manage to frighten everybody, and to get just nothing at all. The real demands of those who elect them are moderate agrarian changes, including the compulsory sale to the State of certain feudal privileges still retained by the landlords ; a change in the method of appointing the clergy, who are now nominated by the landlords, and whom the electors wish either to have elected by the parishes or nominated by the King ; and some reforms tending to raise the position of national schoolmasters, —not, one would think, a very dangerous programme, and certainly a programme which, if the Radicals understood com- promise, could be substantially carried out. While urging it, however, the Radical Deputies allow a few of their number to say things which strike panic into the propertied classes, make proposals provocative of threats of a dissolution which they admittedly are not prepared to meet, and introduce Bills which can by no possibility have any effect, except to suggest that the party do not want to reorganise, but only to level existing institutions. One of these, a bill for the aboli- tion of primogeniture, may be sensible enough, if it is only in- tended as an English Bill of the kind would be, to abolish the legal sanction now given to an injustice ; but its framers, as if out of sheer perversity, have incorporated with it another for the abolition of titles, which is utterly useless, and exposes the party to the suspicion of intending a radical change in the whole social life of the country. They thus obtain credit for designs which King, lords, property-holders, the army, and Denmark's closest neighbours would resist, while they are asking things which, if they got them, would bring them no practical benefit whatever; that is, they arouse the maximum of resistance for
the sake of the minimum of positive advantage, surely mis- management of the most patent kind. Not to mention the absurdity of abolishing titles in a country where it is not pro- posed to abolish hereditary monarchy, what do the Danish Radicals expect to gain by their last effort? They will doubt- less say that they seek, if not equality, at least a nearer approximation to it, that titles are opposed to their ideal, and that as they can abolish them without raising an angry cry about property, they attempt the easier work first. That argument seems, we dare say, sound to men who have seen title and privilege so long combined that they scarcely know how to distinguish between them, as it once seemed sound to Frenchmen, but it is to the last degree unpractical. If history shows anything conclusively, it is that society can abolish titles, but that Parliaments cannot, and that it is easy to abolish privileges which are substantial, but nearly impossible to abolish privileges which are as unsubstantial as the breath which originally conferred them. The experiment has been tried three times in modern history under most favourable circumstances, and has only succeeded once. The American Republicans, not having any titled class among them, prohibited in their Constitution the establishment of one, and the Constitution being in this respect supported by national feeling, has been strictly obeyed. There are still families in the Union whose claim of birth is admitted on all hands, and who obtain from it a very distinct, though inde- scribable social precedence and ascendancy, but there is no family now using or claiming a title of nobility, the single American family which possesses one having, except in English peerages, laid it aside. Lord Fairfax in Maryland is only Mr. Fairfax, a citizen in good esteem. Denmark, however, possesses a titled class, and if her Radical levlers will read French and English history, they will see that the only way to kill titles is to protect them from multi- plication, and suffer them to die out. All Englishmen recollect with mingled shame and amusement how hard Parliament strove to suppress the use of territorial titles by Roman Catholic Bishops, and how utterly the law failed, the very Members who voted for the Bill using the prohibited titles the next week on their letters. A Protestant people, wild with annoyance and excitement, could not put down distinctively Catholic titles, even by legislation. The English penalties may seem to Danish observers too feeble for the end which it was sought to secure, but they will hardly be able to go farther than the French Terrorists did, and the Terrorists failed as completely as the English House of Commons. They swept away privileges, many of them involving rights of contract, without a struggle ; they altered the laws regulating the devolution of property without a serious contest ; they abolished the nobles in such fashion that no aristocratic Chamber has been able to secure real power in France ; but the effort to do away with titles, though made in frantic earnest, altogether failed. During two years, to bear a title or use a title as a mode of address, was to invite a sentence of death at the hands either of the executioner or of the mob, and during many years the practice was legally pro- hibited; but the titles remained nevertheless, and if historical, are as much used and as much valued in France as ever. They are protected by no law, and no prejudice, and no national habit, but only by the dislike of every man to commit a gra- tuitous rudeness, and the protection is sufficient. As they convey no privilege, it is worth no man's while to assail them, except with argument or ridicule ; and argument and ridicule have always been powerless against social habits which any class has, or thinks it has, a strong interest in maintaining. The Danish Radicals will fail, just as the French Radicals failed ; and while failing, will have wasted the force which, wisely applied, might have abolished all the privileges which are really injurious to those who do not possess them, and which they, from habit, connect with the labels borne by those who are usually invested with them ; and will, moreover, have greatly deepened the popular notion of the importance of the distinctions which they so earnestly desire to deprive of any importance at all.
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