TOPICS OF THE DAY.
A NATION -UNDER AMPUTATION.
THOSE Englishmen are oddly made who can read the daily tidings from Denmark without a stifled feeling of shame. The bravest of little kingdoms, the only one in Europe which can claim full kindred with ourselves, is visibly in the death throe, struggling for life with vain self-sacrifice and useless heroism against a foe who answers appeals to justice by the bayonet, repays concession by showers of bullets, and meets a patriotic despair by ordering up more Croats. We com- pared Denmark last week to a queenly woman dying amidst the wolves, but the comparison did her injustice. There is not a scream in her whole frame, not even a cry such as Italy sent forth under the same circumstances, nothing but that stern silence with which strong men fight up against a never- theless inevitable wrong. The people see that despite the friendship to gain which they have made such concessions, despite the much vaunted regard of Europe for its own public law, despite the crave for international justice which English Liberals profess to feel, they are abandoned by all the world, abandoned because they are weak, to a foe in whose eyes weakness is the best excuse for brutality, and they are doing their work as men whose valour is not, like German fidelity, a matter of calculation. The Rigsdag, with a gloomy self- restraint that suggests what Englishmen once were, calls on the population to maintain order and trust to the honour of its Parliament, the Premier thanks the House for not distrusting a General who has failed, the King tells the people that he relies on God and them alone, and the army forced to retreat without fighting through snowstorms and cold such as destroyed the army of the Niemen, with the men half asleep from fatigue, and horses dropping dead under the snow, and the bitter conviction that honour and national existence had both alike been sacrificed, still struggled on, its discipline intact, "the loggers springing up at the first word from their officers." Holstein is lost, and Schleswig, Jutland is indefen- sible, and the monarchy is reduced to two small islands in a sea frozen for half the year, and still the Danes utter no word of treaty or surrender. The army is massed at Diippel and in Alsen, positions from which it cannot retreat, and there awaits an attack which must end in massacre from an army treble its own numbers, and backed by nations with thirty-five times the Danish population. Since in the Indian mutinies eighteen thousand Englishmen turned at bay against the population of a continent there has been no such spectacle. As in India, too, the assailants feel and fear the superiority of the individual Northman, and expel isolated Danish officials, hunting them out into the snow with their wives and families as the Hindos- tanees hunted Englishmen, lest if they remained the more numerous race should again feel compelled, as by a mesmeric force, to render them obedience. Day after day, the Prussians, and the heavy allies to whom they leave the fighting, and from whom they will steal the spoil, are bringing up more troops, more artillery, more material, for a grand overwhelming rush across the Alsen Sound, are occupy- ing Schleswig, driving their own countrymen out of Holstein, collecting peasant's rafters for firewood, ordering in boots, and wheat, and forage, and beef, to be paid for by paper warrants, and expelling newspaper agents in order that if at last unsuc- cessful, they may have a monopoly of the manufacture of bulle- tins. The stick makes Prussians good soldiers, though they have only a silly martinet for their Commander-in-Chief, Diippel will be taken though every Dane should die before the works, and Prince Charles will have the glory of announcing that every Prussian who helped to win a struggle of thirty-five to one will be pointed at hereafter as "a brave man," Do they in Prussia point in astonishment at a man who is brave ? Jutland is menaced already, and can be entered at will, and Denmark,—though Germans are, like the fiends of the middle ages, unable to cross flowing water,—may in a fortnight be, as a nation, extinct. There is no help in their proud history of nearly twelve hundred years, none in their freedom or their high character, none in the agony of courage and humiliation with which they now witness the probable extinction of their name, the certainty of their downfall from their old place among the nations. They can die, it is true, and do die' but their dea'hs only fertilize a soil better fertilized with dung than men leaving the victory now, as it has been ever since history began, to the relentless and the strong. It is said, apparently with truth, that before Oversee a Danish regiment allowed an Austrian one to approach within a hundred yards and then swept away a third of them by a single discharge, but even self-restraint like that, the last and highest quality acquired by soldiership, is in this case valueless. There are Germans to spare on earth, and their leaders are flinging them away as if even they regarded them only as somewhat slow projectiles. The frightful haste of the campaign will cost the allies ten thousand lives in hospital, but then to these military despotisms what are ten thousand lives ? They have not even to pay for the sub- stitutes the conscription sends them up, and as for opinion, correspondents can be expelled, and letters intercepted and read, and editors imprisoned for being truthful, until opinion has ceased to be an executive force.
It is, we fear, still vain to call upon the governing class to vindicate the position of Great Eritain, and arrest this course- of triumphant violence; but they may reasonably be asked to spare the allies whom they are deserting—because, forsooth no man should help another except where refusal would cost him something—the pain of dishonourable counsel. To judge by the language of some of the papers, Denmark is considered. unreasonable and violent because she persists in fighting in the face of hopeless odds, and is advised to unite herself with a great Scandinavian monarchy. That is not the way in which Englishmen regard a struggle against overwhelming numbers when it is waged by themselves, or by those with whom they sympathize. The Danes, at the worst, can only be extin- guished, and there are times in a nation's life, as in the life of a man, when concession is simply baseness, when there is nothing to be done but to set one's back to the wall and fight on till death or Providence close the struggle. Such an hour has arrived for Denmark, and Englishmen, if they are content to stand aloof, may at least in decency if not from sympathy refrain from hissing. There are men among us who despise Leonidas for defending ThermoDylse because the battle wasted arrows ; but the nation has not yet reached that point of philosophic degradation. As to absorption, let Englishmen reflect with what feeling, if beaten by coalesced Europe, they would welcome a proposal to become a State of the American Union, and refrain from suggestions which seem to their objects apologies at once for treachery and for murder. In truth they are but excusing to themselves an inaction of which they are half ashamed, but while they doubt, and hesitate, and wait till the German Powers tear off the mask and compel them too late to intervene, let them at least give to men who are dying that their country may live the poor reward of appreciation. If the amputation must be performed, and performed without hope of recovery, let the bystanders who could stop it at least seem aware that amputation involves pain.
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