DENMARK AND THE DUCHIES.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR, We have noted your comments on our letter in the Spectator of November 30th. You say : " The Dance seem to want no more than the recovery of North Slesvig." It should clearly be understood that there is a Court and Diplomatic intrigue on foot, just like here in 1864; the real Danes, as our correspondence testifies, have not been heard yet. Let me quote the words of a well-known Danish patriot whom the world's Press. including the Spectator, honoured, when Siam joined the Allies, for having in 1891 saved that distant country, and incidentally probably civilization, from German domination :— " It is not true that the Danes do not want the stolen provinces back. For hundreds of years up to 1864, when we were betrayed and overwhelmed, we kept the barbarians from overrunning North Europe. We owe it to ourselves and to our hosts of fallen heroes to take thein back. It would be our national duty, were it not England's and the Allies' duty to give them back to us. President Wilson said the other day about Alsace-Lorraine: 'France has suffered a wrong in the loss of her provinces and the way to repair it is to return them to her?' Why should this apply to France in 1870 and not to Denmark in 1864? The absurdity of a ' com- promise' with the robbers when at last they are in the hands of the police is evident. It is simply a transparent Hun conspiracy— to keep Kiel—between the Hidden Hand here and in Copenhagen. It is a compromise which no Dane not a traitor to himself and to his own land, nor any Briton with a sense of honour and patriot- ism, ootild agree to. Speaking for Danes of unadulterated Danish blood, we demand our stolen provinces handed back to us and an adequate indemnity for the outrage committed and the sufferings endured in slavery by our hill and kin for fifty-four years."
Finally, Sir, you remark : " They [the Danes] apparently regard the more southern provinces as Germanized." Of course they are! How could it be otherwise? For fifty-four years the Huns, with all the devilish devices which the world surely now knows they have always practised in conquered lands, have suppressed
the old Danish tongue and persecuted and mercilessly expelled the old inhabitants of the three stolen provinces.- There can be no " question of self-determination " under such circumstances, and the Danes will have a long task in driving out the poison inculcated by Hun education into the few old inhabitants that are
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