THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES

§ 1

When the early history of Scandinavia is studied as a process of social evolution rather than as a chronicle of feuds and of the exploits of heroes of various grades,[638] it is found to constitute a miniature norm of a simple and instructive sort. Taken as it emerges from the stage of myth, about the time of Charlemagne, it presents a vivid phase of barbarism, acted on by powerful conditions of change. The three sections of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden stand in a certain natural gradation as regards their possibilities of political development. All alike were capable only of a secondary or tertiary civilisation, being at once geographically disrupted and incapable, on primitive methods, of feeding an abundant population. In their early piratical stage, the Scandinavians are not greatly different from the pre-Homeric Greeks as these were conceived by Thucydides; but whereas the Greeks came in contact with the relatively high civilisations which had preceded them, the Scandinavians of the Dark Ages had no contacts save with the primitive life of the pre-Christian Slavs, the premature and arrested cross-civilisations of Carlovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England, and, in a fuller and more fruitful degree, with the similarly arrested semi-Christian civilisation of Celtic Ireland, which latter counted for so much in their literature.

But in barbarian conditions certain main laws of social evolution operate no less clearly than in later stages; and we see sections of the Norsemen passing from tribal anarchy to primitive monarchy, and thence to military "empire," afterwards returning to their stable economic basis, as every military empire sooner or later must. Of the Scandinavian sections, Denmark and the southern parts of Sweden (round the Maelar) are the least disrupted and most fertile; and these were respectively the most readily reducible to a single rule. In all, given to begin with the primordial bias to royalism in any of its forms,[639] the establishment of a supreme and hereditary military rule was only a question of time; every successive attempt, however undone by the forces of barbaric independence, being a lead and stimulus to others. It is important to note how the process was promoted by, and in its turn promoted, the establishment of Christianity. The incomplex phenomena in Scandinavia throw a new light on the more complex evolution of other parts of Christendom. Primitive polytheism is obviously unpropitious to monarchic rule; and in every ancient religion it can be seen to have undergone adaptations where such rule arose. In the widely varying systems of Homeric Greece, Babylonia, Egypt, and Rome, the same tendency is visibly at work in different degrees, the ascendent principle of earthly government being more or less directly duplicated in theological theory. Under the Roman Empire, all cults were in a measure bent to the imperial service, and it was only the primary exclusiveness of Christianity that put it in conflict with the State. Once the emperor accepted it, recognising its political use, and conceded its exclusive claims, it became a trebly effective political instrument,[640] centralising as it did the whole machinery of religion throughout the Empire, and co-ordinating all to the political system. To use a modern illustration, it "syndicated" the multifold irregular activities of worship, and was thus the ideal system for a centralised and imperial State.[641] This was as readily seen by Theodoric and Charlemagne as by the rulers at Constantinople; and to such a perception, broadly speaking, is to be attributed the forcing of Christianity on the northern races by their kings.

Northern paganism, more than the semi-cosmopolitan polytheism of the south in the period of Augustus, was a local and domestic faith, lending itself to separateness and independence, as did the civic and family religions of early Greece and Rome. While there were communal assemblies with specially solemn sacrifices, the popular beliefs were such that every district could have its holy places, and every family or group its special rites;[642] and in primitive Scandinavia a priesthood could still less develop than even in primitive Germany, whose lack of any system corresponding to the Druidism of Gaul is still empirically ascribed to some anti-sacerdotal element in the "national character," whereas it is plainly a result of the nomadic life-conditions of the scattered people. In germ the Teutonic priesthood was extremely powerful, being the judiciary power from which there was no appeal.[643] But an organised priestly system can arise only on the basis of some measure of political levelling or centralisation, involving some peaceful inter-communication. Romanised Christianity, coming ready-made from its centre, permitted of no worship save that of the consecrated church, and no ministry save that of the ordained priest.[644] Only the most obstinately conservative kings or chieftains, therefore, could fail to see their immediate advantage in adopting it.[645]

So plain was the political tendency of the new creed that after the Christianisation of Denmark by Erik I the nobility forced Erik II to restore the pagan system; but the triumph of the Church, like that of monarchy, was only a question of time. Even kings who, being caught late in life, did not renounce their paganism, are found ready to favour the missionaries; and in Denmark such tolerance on the part of Gorm the Old (d. 941), successor of Erik II, is followed by the official Christianity of his son Harald Bluetooth. Danish "empire" duly follows; and in the next century we find Knut the Great (1014-1035) utterly reversing[646] the pagan policy of his father, Svend[647] (who had been enabled to dethrone his Christian father, Harald, by the pagan malcontents), and dying in the odour of sanctity, "lord" of six kingdoms—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, Scotland, and Wales.

The principle is established from another side in the case of Norway. There the first notable monarchic unification had been wrought by the pagan Harold Fairhair (875), without the aid of Christianity; and the pagan resistance was so irreducible that revolters sailed off in all directions, finding footing in Scotland and Ireland, and in particular in Northern France and Iceland.[648] In the next generation the monarchy relapsed to the old position; and Harold's Christian son Hakon (educated in England) had to cede to the determined demands of the pagan majority, who forced him to join in the old heathen rites, and murdered the leading Christians;[649] a course followed by the further weakening of the power of the crown. The Danish Harald Bluetooth, son of Gorm, who then conquered Norway, sought to re-establish the Church by the sword; but Hakon Jarl, who followed, gave up Christianity in order to reign and again put it down by violence.[650] The next king to restore it, Olaf Tryggvason, who had met with Christianity in his wanderings in Greece, Russia, England, and Germany,[651] established that creed by brute force when he attained the throne (977), and again the spirit of local independence, abnormally conserved in Norway by the special separateness set up by the geographical conditions, fiercely resisted the new system as it had done the rule of Harold Fairhair, many defeated pagans withdrawing to remote glens and fastnesses, where to this day their mythology thrives.[652] On Olaf's final defeat and death (1000), his immediate successors, jarls supported by Denmark and Sweden, were content to leave paganism alone, as representing a too dangerous spirit of independence; and when St. Olaf, in turn, again undertook to crush it, he found he had but beaten down and alienated the forces that would have enabled him to resist Knut.[653] Danish "imperialism" had been evolved while the Norwegian kings were striving towards it; and St. Olaf was exiled, defeated, and slain (1030). His subsequent popularity is a mere posthumous Church-made cult of the Christian period.

§ 2

The ultimate arrest of all aggression by the Scandinavian peoples is to be explained as a simple redressing of the balance between them and the States they had formerly plundered. To begin with, all the Scandinavian groups alike practised piracy[654] as against the more civilised States of Northern Europe; and piracy showed them the way to conquest and colonisation. At home their means of subsistence were pasturage, fishing, the chase, and an agriculture which cannot have been easily extensible beyond the most fertile soils; hence a constant pressure of population, promoting piracy and aggressive emigration. How the pressure was purposively met is not clear; but as the Scandinavian father, like the Greek and Roman, was free either to expose or bring up a new-born child,[655] there is a presumption that at some periods exposure was not uncommon.[656] There is even testimony, going back to the eighth century and recurring frequently as late as the twelfth, to the effect that a certain number of men were periodically sent away by lot when the mouths had visibly multiplied beyond the meat.

But without any such organised exodus there were adventurers enough.[657] Hence colonisations and conquests in Scotland, the Hebrides, Ireland, Iceland, Russia, England, and remote plundering expeditions by land and river, some getting as far south as Italy; one conquering expedition passing from Gaul through Arab Spain (827) and along the Mediterranean coasts, north and south; another passing through Russia to Constantinople. Thus the Norwegian and Danish stocks must have rooted in nearly every part of the British Islands; and the settlement in Gaul of a colony of revolters from Norway, in the reign of Harold Fairhair, built up one of the great provinces of France. Only in Iceland did the colonists preserve their language; hence, in terms of the hallucination of race, the assumption that the others "failed," when in reality they helped to constitute new races; no more "failing" in these cases than did the British stock in its North American colonies. It may be said, indeed, that the Teutonic stocks which overran Italy, Spain, and North Africa did in large part physically disappear thence, their physiological type having failed to survive as against the southern types. Even on that view, however, the impermanent type must in some degree have affected that which survived. In any case, the amalgamated Norse stock in Normandy, grown French-speaking, in turn overran England and part of Italy and Sicily, and, in the Crusades, formed new kingdoms in the East; while in the case of England, turning English-speaking, they again modified the stock of the nation. As against the notion that in this case there was "failure" either for French or for Normans, we might almost adopt the mot of M. ClÉmenceau and call England "a French colony gone wrong."[658] In terms of realities there has been no racial decease; it is but names and languages that have changed with the generations.

But there was an arrest of military exodus from Scandinavia; and thenceforward the Norse-speaking stocks figure as more or less small and retiring communities. They gave up piracy and conquest only because they had to, Danish imperialism causing the arrest on a wide scale, as every monarchic unification had done on a small.[659] When Knut reigned over six kingdoms, piracy was necessarily checked as among these; and when Knut's empire broke up after his death through the repulsive powers of its component parts and the relative lack of resources in Denmark, the various States of north-western Europe, in the terms of the case, were more able than before to resist Norse attacks in general. In England, William the Conqueror was fain to keep them off by bribery and intrigue; but the States with the greater natural resources grew in strength, while those of Scandinavia could not. When the pirates began to get the worst of it, and when the Scandinavian kings had cause to dread reprisals from those of the west, piracy began to dwindle. The last regular practitioners were the pagan Wends, and the republican pagans of the city of Jomsborg, who plundered the Scandinavians as they had of yore plundered others; and after the Christianised Danish people had for a time defended themselves by voluntary associations, both sets of pirates were overthrown by an energetic Danish king. The suppression was under Christian auspices; but it is a conventional fallacy to attribute it to the influence of Christianity. It was simply an act of necessary progressive polity, like the suppression of the Cilician pirates by Pompeius.

§ 3

From the period of arrest of aggression, the economic and political history of the Scandinavian States is that of slightly expansible communities with comparatively small resources; and their high status to-day is the illustration of what civilisation may come to under such conditions. In the feudal period they made small material or intellectual progress. It is not probable that the Norse population was ever greater than in the eighteenth century, though Malthus had a surmise that it might anciently have been so:[660] the old belief that Scandinavia was the great officina gentium, the nursery of the races which overran the Roman Empire, is a delusion; but it is certain that the increase since the twelfth century has been even slower than the European average. In the absence of emigration, this meant for past centuries constant restraint of marriage through lack of houses and livelihoods—the preventive check in its most stringent form. Emigration there must have been; but the check must also have been strong. Thus, while the lot of the common people, in so far as it remained free, was likely to be comparatively comfortable, the land-owning classes, in the absence of industry and commerce, tended to become nearly all-powerful; and the Church, which inherits and does not squander, would engross most of the power if not specially checked. The conditions were thus as unfavourable to intellectual as to material progress.

Denmark was the first of the Scandinavian States to develop a considerable commerce, beginning as did Holland on the footing of the fishery;[661] and on that basis there was a certain renewal of Danish empire. But this again could not hold out against the neighbouring forces; and in the thirteenth century, the herring fishery in the Baltic failing, it had to yield its hold on the mainland cities of Hamburg and LÜbeck, which began a new career of commercial power as the nucleus of the great trading federation of the Hansa cities, while Denmark itself was riven by the struggles of six claimants of the throne. The result was a "feudal and sacerdotal oligarchy,"[662] leading to an era of "the complete triumph of the Romish clergy over the temporal power in Denmark," in which the peasantry were reduced to absolute predial slavery.[663] Similar evolution took place in Norway,[664] though with less depression of the peasantry,[665] by reason of the small scope there for capitalistic agriculture; and there too the now nascent commerce was appropriated by the Hansa.[666] In Sweden, where industry remained so primitive that down till the sixteenth century there was hardly any attempt to work up the native iron,[667] Germans greatly predominated in the cities and controlled trade,[668] even before the accession of Albert of Mecklenburg (1363), who further depressed the native nobility in the German interest.[669] On the other hand, the clergy were less plenipotent than in the sister kingdoms, the people having retained more of their old power.

In Sweden, as in the other Scandinavian States, however, physical strife and mental stagnation were the ruling conditions. Down till the sixteenth century her history is pronounced "a wretched detail of civil wars, insurrections, and revolutions, arising principally from the jealousies subsisting between the kings and the people, the one striving to augment their power, the other to maintain their independence."[670] The same may be said of the sister kingdoms, all alike being torn and drained by innumerable strifes of faction and wars with each other. The occasional forcible and dynastic unions of crowns came to nothing; and the Union of Calmar (1397), an attempt to confederate the three kingdoms under one crown, repeatedly collapsed. The marvel is that in such an age even the attempt was made. The remarkable woman who planned and first effected it, Queen Margaret of Norway, appealed in the first instance with heavy bribes for the co-operation of the clergy,[671] who, especially in Sweden, where they preferred the Danish rule to the domination of the nobles,[672] were always in favour of it for ecclesiastical reasons.

Had such a union permanently succeeded, it would have eliminated a serious source of positive political evil; but to carry forward Scandinavian civilisation under the drawbacks of the medieval difficulty of inter-communication (involving lack of necessary culture-contacts), the natural poverty of the soil, and the restrictive pressure of the Catholic Church, would have been a task beyond the power of a monarchy comprising three mutually jealous sections. As it was, the old strifes recurred almost as frequently as before, and moral union was never developed. If historical evidence is to count for anything, the experience of the Scandinavian stocks should suffice to discredit once for all the persistent pretence that the "Teutonic races" have a faculty for union denied to the Celtic, inasmuch as they, apparently the most purely Teutonic of all, were even more irreconcilable, less fusible, than the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and the Germans down till our own day, and much more mutually jealous than the quasi-Teutonic provinces of the Netherlands, which, after the severance of Belgium, have latterly lost their extreme repulsions, while those of Scandinavia are not yet dead.[673] The explanation, of course, is not racial in any case; but it is for those who affirm that capacity for union is a Teutonic gift to find a racial excuse.

With the Reformation, though that was nowhere more clearly than in Scandinavia a revolution of plunder, there began a new progress, in respect not of any friendliness of the Lutheran system to thought and culture, but of the sheer break-up of the intellectual ice of the old regimen. In Denmark the process is curiously instructive. Christian II, personally a capable and reformative but cruel tyrant, aimed throughout his life at reducing the power alike of the clergy and the nobles, and to that end sought on the one hand to abolish serfdom and educate the poor and the burghers,[674] and on the other to introduce Lutheranism (1520). From the latter attempt he was induced to desist, doubtless surmising that the remedy might for him be a new disease: but on his enforcing the reform of slavery he was rebelled against and forced to fly by the nobility, who thereupon oppressed the people more than ever.[675] His uncle and successor, Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, accepted the mandate of the nobles to the extent of causing to be publicly burned in his presence all the laws of the last reign in favour of the peasants, closing the poor schools throughout the kingdom, burning the new books,[676] and pledging himself to expel Lutheranism. He seems, however, to have been secretly a Protestant, and to have evaded his pledge; and the rapid spread of the new heresy, especially in the cities, brought about a new birth of popular literature in the vernacular, despite the suppression of the schools.[677] In a few years' time, Frederick, recognising the obvious interest of the crown, and finding the greater nobles in alliance with the clergy, made common cause with the smaller nobility, and so was able (1527) to force on the prelates, who could hope for no better terms from the exiled king, the toleration of Protestantism, the permission of marriage to the clergy, and a surrender of a moiety of the tithes.[678] A few years later (1530) the monasteries were either stormed by the populace or abandoned by the monks, their houses and lands being divided among the municipalities, the king and his courtiers, and the secular clergy.[679] After a stormy interregnum, in which the Catholic party made a strenuous reaction, the next king, Christian III, taking the nobles and commons-deputies into partnership, made with their help an end of the Catholic system; the remaining lands, castles, and manors of the prelates going to the crown, and the tithes being parcelled among the landowners, the king, and the clergy. Naturally a large part of the lands, as before, was divided among the nobles,[680] who were in this way converted to Protestantism. Thus whereas heathen kings had originally embraced Christianity to enable them to consolidate their power, Christian kings embraced Protestantism to enable them to recover wealth and power from the Catholic Church. Creed all along followed interest;[681] and the people had small concern in the change.[682]

Norway, being under the same crown, followed the course of Denmark. In Sweden the powerful Gustavus Vasa saw himself forced at the outset of his reign to take power and wealth from the Church if he would have any of his own; and after the dramatic scene in the Diet of Westeras (1527), in which he broke out with a passionate vow to renounce the crown if he were not better supported,[683] he carried his point. The nobles, being "squared"[684] by permission to resume such of their ancestral lands as had been given to churches and convents since 1454, and by promise of further grants, forced the bishops to consent to surrender to the king their castles and strongholds, and to let him fix their revenues; all which was duly done. The monasteries were soon despoiled of nearly all their lands, many of which were seized by or granted in fief to the barons;[685] and the king became head of the Church in as full a degree as Henry VIII in England;[686] sagaciously, and in part unscrupulously, creating for the first time in Scandinavia a strong yet not wholly despotic monarchy, with such revenues from many sources[687] as made possible the military power and activity of Gustavus Adolphus, and later the effort of Charles XII to create an "empire"—an effort which, necessarily failing, reduced Sweden permanently to her true economic basis.

Apart from those remarkable episodes, the development of the Scandinavian States since the sixteenth century has been, on their relatively small scale, that of the normal monarchic community with a variously vigorous democratic element; shaken frequently by civil strife; wasting much strength in insensate wars; losing much through bad kings and gaining somewhat from the good; passing painfully from bigotry to tolerance; getting rid of their old aristocracies and developing new; exhibiting in the mass the northern vice of alcoholism, yet maintaining racial vigour; disproportionately taxing their producers as compared with their non-producers; aiming, nevertheless, at industry and commerce, and suffering from the divisive social influences they entail; meddling in international strifes, till latterly the surrounding powers preponderated too heavily; disunited and normally jealous of each other, even when dynastically united, through stress of crude patriotic prejudice and lack of political science; frequently retrograding, yet in the end steadily progressing in such science as well as in general culture and well-being. Losses of territory—as Finland and Schleswig-Holstein—at the hands of stronger rivals, and the violent experiences and transitions of the Napoleonic period, have left them on a relatively stable and safe basis, albeit still mutually jealous and unable to pass beyond the normal monarchic stage. To-day their culture is that of all the higher civilisations, as are their social problems.

§ 4

In the history of Scandinavian culture, however, lie some special illustrations of sociological law. The remarkable fact that the first great development of old Norse literature occurred in the poor and remote colonial settlement of Iceland is significant of much. To the retrospective yearning of an exiled people, the desire to preserve every memory of the old life in the fatherland, is to be attributed the grounding of the saga-cult in Iceland; and the natural conditions, enforcing long spells of winter leisure, greatly furthered the movement. But the finest growth of the new literature, it turns out, is due to culture-contacts—an unexpected confirmation, in a most unlikely quarter, of a general principle arrived at on other data. The vigilant study of our own day has detected, standing out from the early Icelandic literature, "a group of poems which possess the very qualities of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, passionate dramatic power, and noble simplicity of language, which [other] Icelandic poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at all. They are the poetry of the 'Western Islands'"[688]—that is, the poetry of the meeting and mixing of the "Celtic" and Scandinavian stocks in Ireland and the Hebrides—the former already much mixed, and proportionally rich in intellectual variations. It was in this area that "a magnificent school of poetry arose, to which we owe works that for power and beauty can be paralleled in no Teutonic language till centuries after their date.... This school, which is totally distinct from the Icelandic, ran its own course apart and perished before the thirteenth century."[689]

But the Icelandic civilisation as a whole could not indefinitely progress on its own basis any more than the Irish. Beyond a certain point both needed new light and leading; for the primeval spirit of strife never spontaneously weakened; the original Icelandic stock being, to begin with, a selection of revolters from over-rule. So continual domestic feuds checked mental evolution in Iceland as in old Scandinavia; and the reduction of the island to Norwegian rule in the thirteenth century could not do more for it than monarchy was doing for Norway. Mere Christianity without progressive conditions of culture availed less for imaginative art than free paganism had done; and when higher culture-contacts became possible, the extreme poverty of Iceland tended more than ever to send the enterprising people where the culture and comfort were. It is in fact not a possible seat for a relatively flourishing civilisation in the period of peaceful development. The Reformation seems there to have availed for very little indeed. It was vehemently resisted,[690] but carried by the preponderant acquisitive forces: "nearly all who took part in it were men of low type, moved by personal motives rather than religious zeal."[691] "The glebes and hospital lands were a fresh power in the hands of the crown, and the subservient Lutheran clergy became the most powerful class in the island; while the bad system of underleasing at rack-rent and short lease with unsecured tenant-right extended in this way over at least a quarter of the better land, stopping any possible progress." For the rest, "the Reformation had produced a real poet [Hallgrim Petersen], but the material rise of Iceland"—that is, the recent improvements in the condition of the people—"has not yet done so,"[692] though poetry is still cultivated in Iceland very much as music is elsewhere.

Thus this one little community may be said to have reached the limits of its evolution, as compared with others, simply because of the strait natural conditions in which its lot was cast. But to think of it as a tragically moribund organism is merely to proceed upon the old hallucinations of race-consciousness. Men reared in Iceland have done their part in making European civilisation, entering the more southerly Scandinavian stocks as these entered the stocks of western Europe; and the present population, who are a remnant, have no more cause to hang their heads than any family that happens to have few members or to have missed wealth. Failure is relative only to pretension or purpose.

The modern revival of Scandinavian culture, as must needs be, is the outcome of all the European influences. At the close of the sixteenth century, in more or less friendly intercourse with the other Protestant countries of north Europe, Denmark began effectively to develop a literature such as theirs, imaginative and scientific, in the vernacular as well as in Latin; and so the development went on while Sweden was gaining military glory with little enlightenment. Then a rash attack upon Sweden ended in a loss of some of the richest Danish provinces (1658); whereafter a sudden parliamentary revolution, wrought by a league of king and people against the aristocracy, created not a constitutional but an absolute and hereditary monarchy (1660), enthroning divine right at the same instant in Denmark and Norway as in England. Thereafter, deprived of their old posts and subjected to ruinous taxes, the nobility fell rapidly into poverty;[693] and the merchant class, equally overtaxed, withdrew their capital; the peasantry all the while remaining in a state of serfdom.[694] Then came a new series of wars with Sweden, recurring through generations, arresting, it is said, literature, law, philosophy, and medicine,[695] but not the natural sciences, then so much in evidence elsewhere: Tycho Brahe being followed in astronomy by Horrebow, while chemistry, mathematics, and even anatomy made progress. But to this period belongs the brilliant dramatist and historian Holberg, the first great man of letters in modern Scandinavia (d. 1754); and in the latter half of the eighteenth century the two years of ascendency of the freethinking physician Struensee as queen's favourite (1770-72) served partially to emancipate the peasants, establish religious toleration, abolish torture, and reform the administration. Nor did his speedy overthrow and execution wholly undo his main work,[696] which outdid that of many generations of the old rÉgime. Still, the history of his rise and fall, his vehement speed of reconstruction and the ruinous resistance it set up, is one of the most dramatic of the many warnings of history against thinking suddenly to elevate a nation by reforms imposed wholly from without.[697]

Thenceforward, with such fluctuations as mark all culture-history, the Scandinavian world has progressed mentally nearly step for step with the rest of Europe, producing scholars, historians, men of science, artists, and imaginative writers in more than due proportion. Many names which stand for solid achievement in the little-read Scandinavian tongues are unknown save to specialists elsewhere; but those of Holberg, LinnÆus, Malte-Brun, Rask, Niebuhr, Madvig, ŒhlenschlÄger, Thorwaldsen, and Swedenborg tell of a comprehensive influence on the thought and culture of Europe during a hundred years in which Europe was being reborn; and in our own day some of the greatest imaginative literature of the modern world comes from Norway, long the most backward of the group. Ibsen, one of a notable company of masters, stood at the head of the drama of the nineteenth century; and the society which sustained him, however he may have satirised it, is certificated abreast of its age.

§ 5

In one aspect the Scandinavian polities have a special lesson for the larger nations. They have perforce been specially exercised latterly, as of old, by the problem of population; and in Norway there was formerly made one of the notable, if not one of the best, approaches to a practical solution of it. Malthus long ago[698] noted the Norwegian marriage-rate as the lowest in Europe save that of Switzerland; and he expressed the belief that in his day Norway was "almost the only country in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehension expressed of a redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower classes of people is in some degree seen and understood."[699] This state of things having long subsisted, there is a presumption that it persists uninterruptedly from pagan times, when, as we have seen, there existed a deliberate population-policy; for Christian habits of mind can nowhere be seen to have set up such a tendency, and it would be hard to show in the history of Norway any great political change which might effect a rapid revolution in the domestic habits of the peasantry, such as occurred in France after the Revolution. Broadly speaking, the mass of the Norwegian people had till the last century continued to live under those external or domiciliary restraints on multiplication which were normal in rural Europe in the Middle Ages, and which elsewhere have been removed by industrialism; yet without suffering latterly from a continuance of the severer medieval destructive checks. They must, therefore, have put a high degree of restraint on marriage, and probably observed parental prudence in addition.

When it is found that in Sweden, where the conditions and usages were once similar, there was latterly at once less prudential restraint on marriage and population, and a lower standard of material well-being, the two cases are seen to furnish a kind of experimentum crucis. The comparatively late maintenance of a powerful military system in Sweden having there prolonged the methods of aristocratic and bureaucratic control while they were being modified in Denmark-Norway, Swedish population in the eighteenth century was subject to artificial stimulus. From about the year 1748, the Government set itself, on the ordinary empirical principle of militarism, to encourage population.[700] Among its measures were the variously wise ones of establishing medical colleges and lying-in and foundling hospitals, the absolute freeing of the internal trade in grain, and the withdrawal in 1748 of an old law limiting the number of persons allowed to each farm. The purpose of that law had been to stimulate population by spreading tillage; but the spare soil being too unattractive, the young people emigrated. On the law being abolished, population did increase considerably, rising between 1751 and 1800 from 1,785,727 to 2,347,308,[701] though some severe famines had occurred within the period. But in the year 1799, when Malthus visited the country, the increased population suffered from famine very severely indeed, living mainly and miserably on bark bread.[702] It was one of Malthus's great object-lessons in his science. On one side a poor country was artificially over-populated; on the other, the people of Norway, an even poorer country, directly and indirectly[703] restrained their rate of increase, while the Government during a long period wrought to the same end by the adjustment of its military system and by making a certificate of earning power or income necessary for all marriages.[704] The result was that, save in the fishing districts, where speculative conditions encouraged early marriages and large families, the Norwegian population were better off than the Swedish.[705]

Already in Malthus' youth the Norwegian-Danish policy had been altered, all legal and military restrictions on marriage having been withdrawn; and he notes that fears were expressed as to the probable results. It is one of his shortcomings to have entirely abstained from subsequent investigation of the subject; and in his late addendum as to the state of Sweden in 1826 he further fails to note that as a result of a creation there after 1803 of 6,000 new farms from land formerly waste, the country ceased to need to import corn and was able to export a surplus.[706] It still held good, however, that the Norwegian population, being from persistence of prudential habit[707] much the slower in its rate of increase, had the higher standard of comfort, despite much spread of education in Sweden.

Within the past half-century the general development of commerce and of industry has tended broadly to equalise the condition of the Scandinavian peoples. As late as 1835 a scarcity would suffice to drive the Norwegian peasantry to the old subsistence of bark bread, a ruinous resort, seeing that it destroyed multitudes of trees of which the value, could the timber have found a market, would have far exceeded that of a quantity of flour yielding much more and better food. At that period the British market was closed by duties imposed in the interest of the Canadian timber trade.[708] Since the establishment of British free trade, Norwegian timber has become a new source of wealth; and through this and other and earlier commercial developments prudential family habits were affected. Thus, whereas the population of Sweden had all but doubled between 1800 and 1880, the population of Norway had grown even faster.[709] And whereas in 1834 the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate births in Stockholm was 1 to 2.26[710] (one of the results of foundling hospitals, apparently), in 1890 the total Swedish rate was slightly below 1 to 10, while in Norway it was 1 to 14. The modern facilities for emigration have further affected conjugal habits. Latterly, however, there are evidences of a new growth of intelligent control.

In recent years the statistics of emigration and population tell a fairly plain story. In Norway and Sweden alike the excess of births over deaths reached nearly its highest in 1887, the figures being 63,942 for Sweden and 29,233 for Norway. In 1887, however, emigration was about its maximum in both countries, 50,786 leaving Sweden and 20,706 leaving Norway. Thereafter the birth-rate rapidly fell, and the emigration, though fluctuating, has never again risen in Sweden to the volume of 1887-88, though it has in Norway. But when, after falling to 43,728 in 1892, the excess of Swedish births over deaths rises to 60,231 in 1895, while the emigration falls from 45,000 in 1892 to 13,000 in 1894, it is clear that the lesson of regulation is still very imperfectly learned. Norway shows the same fluctuations, the excess of births rising from 23,600 in 1892 to nearly 32,000 in 1896, and again from 27,685 in 1908 to 29,804 in 1909, doubtless because of ups and downs in the harvests, as shown in the increase of marriages from 12,742 in 1892 to 13,962 in 1896.

In Denmark the progression has been similar. There the excess of births over deaths was so far at its maximum in 1886, the figures being 29,986 in a population of a little over 2,000,000; whereafter they slowly decreased, till in 1893 the excess was only 26,235. All the while emigration was active, gradually rising from 4,346 in 1885 to 10,382 in 1891; then again falling to 2,876 in 1896, when the surplus of births over deaths was 34,181—a development sure to force more emigration. In 1911 the population was 2,775,076—a rapid rise; and in 1910 the surplus of births over deaths was 40,110. The Scandinavians are thus still in the unstable progressive stage of popular well-being, though probably suffering less from it than either Germany or England.

Here, then, is a group of kindred peoples apparently at least as capable of reaching a solution of the social problem as any other, and visibly prospering materially and morally in proportion as they bring reason to bear on the vital lines of conduct, though still in the stage of curing over-population by emigration. Given continued peaceful political evolution in the direction first of democratic federation, and further of socialisation of wealth, they may reach and keep the front rank in civilisation, while the more unmanageably large communities face risks of dire vicissitude.

[638] As in Carlyle's Early Kings of Norway, the caput mortuum of his historical method. Much more instructive works on Scandinavian history are available to the English reader. The two volumes on Scandinavia by Crichton and Wheaton (1837) are not yet superseded, though savouring strongly of the conservatism of their period. Dunham, who rapidly produced, for Gardner's Cabinet CyclopÆdia series, histories of Spain and Portugal (5 vols.), Europe during the Middle Ages (4 vols.), and the Germanic Empire (3 vols.), compiled also one of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (3 vols. 1839-40), of inferior quality. But Geijer's History of Sweden, one of the standard modern national histories of Europe, is translated into English as far as the period of Gustavus Vasa (3 vols. of orig. in one of trans. 1845); and the competent History of Denmark by C.-F. Allen is available in a French translation (Copenhagen, 2 tom. 1878). OttÉ's Scandinavian History, 1874, is an unpretending and unliterary but well-informed work, which may be used to check Crichton and Wheaton. The more recent work of Mr. R. Nisbet Bain, Scandinavia: a Political History of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from 1513 to 1900 (Camb. Univ. Press, 1905), is useful for the period covered, but has little sociological value. For the history of ancient Scandinavian literature, the introduction to Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), and Prof. Powell's article on Icelandic Literature in the 10th ed. of the EncyclopÆdia Britannica, are preferable to Schweitzer's Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur (1886, 2 Bde.), which, however, is useful for the modern period.