THE KIEL CANAL.
(To THE EDITOR or THE " SPEcTATon.")
British and Danish patriots should be grateful for your protest against Lord Northcliffe's unceremonious disposal for the benefit of the Huns of two-thirds of the land, including Kiel and the Canal, which Prussia and Austria were permitted by our sad default in 1864 violently to rob unoffending Denmark of. But your own suggestion of " internationalizing " sans ceHmonie and over the head of the owners a part of this territory, which is Danish as much as Sussex is English. hardly improves our posi- tion morally. The damiwsa hereditas in the matter is ours our broken pledge: we caused the Congress of London to assemble. and we were responsible for, and signed, the Treaty guaranteeing the integrity of Denmark, and we eleven short years after dishonoured our signature, tore up our pledge as flagrantly as the Huns in 1914. and we, to aggravate our guilt, had by the promise of armed intervention induced the Danes to withdraw from their frontier defences. We—mighty England—left them to their fate. Is that page of history of which every Briton feels ashamed never to be blotted out ? Is Denmark in the new era of truth and justice and secured rights—for the small as well as the great nations—which the Prime Minister inaugurated in his pronounce- ment on November 9th—is Denmark alone of the Hun victims to continue dismembered and with still bleeding sores ? Denmark, which single-handed in a thousand years' bloody fights kept the Hun hordes at bay, kept their fangs off this very Kiel you are discussing, off the sea, off sea-power ? With the Frankfort, the Bucharest, the Brest-Litovsk robber "Treaties " cancelled,• is that still more iniquitous and barefaced " Treaty " of Vienna of 1864, the result of our betrayal, the instrument by which Slesvig, Holsteen, and Lauenborg were violently torn from the Danish Crown, to stand in history as an eternal monument to perfide Albion ? Do not at this supreme and sublime moment in the world's history let us forget our own Prime Minister's, the late Lord Salisbury's words, when in January, 1864, he warned Lord Palmerston that if our pledge to Denmark were broken, " a stain which time could not dace would lie on our honour." Let our statesmen drop their foolish and dishonest suppression of se recent an historic fact, let them make a clean breast of our sad default in 1864, and see to it that the stain is at last wiped off, and full expiation and restoration granted by us to Denmark for the Hun crime of 1864—the font et origo of the World War.—I am.
20 Montpelier Place, Brighton.
[There is a little more to be said in extenuation of British inaction in 1864 than Mr. Price would admit. France did not care to move, and Great Britain would have had to act alone against Prussia. As for the present situation, the Danes do not seem to want more than the recovery of North Slesvig. They apparently regard the more southern provinces as Germanized. In any case, they do not want to call the neglected clause of the Treaty of Prague into operation, and thus deal directly with their despoiler. They would rather rely upon the Peace Conference.—Ea. Spectator.]
Previous page
