The Evolution of States Part 30

If a saner lesson is to be widely learned, one way to it, if not the best way, may be an effort on the part of the units of the "great nations" to realise the significance of the fortunes of the "little nations," in terms, not of the imagined consciousness of metaphysical ent.i.ties, but of actual human conditions--material, pa.s.sional, and intellectual. We have seen how erudite specialists can express themselves in terms of the fallacy of racial genius. Specialists perhaps as erudite, and certainly mult.i.tudes of educated people, seem capable of thinking as positively in terms of the hallucinations of racial ent.i.ty, national consciousness, political greatness, national revenue, and imperial success. Thus we have publicists speaking of Holland as an "effete nation," of Belgium as "doomed to absorption," of the Scandinavian peoples as "having failed in the race," and of Switzerland as "impotent"; even as they call Spain "dying" and Turkey "decomposing."

Nearly every one of those nations, strictly speaking, has a fairer chance of ultimate continuance without decline of wealth and power than England, whose units in general show as little eye for the laws of decline as Romans did in the days of Augustus. Spain has large potentialities of rich agricultural life; Turkey needs only new habits to develop her natural resources; the life of Belgium, indeed, is, like that of England, in part founded on exhaustible minerals; but Switzerland and Scandinavia, with their restrained populations, may continue to maintain, as they do, a rather higher _average_ of decent life and popular culture than that of the British Islands,[634] though they, too, have at all times a social problem to deal with. British greatness, on dissection, consists in the aggregation of much greater ma.s.ses of wealth and much greater ma.s.ses of poverty, larger groups of idlers and larger swarms of degenerates, with much greater maritime power, than are to be seen in the little nations; certainly not in a higher average of manhood and intelligence and well-being. Sir John Seeley, in a moment of misgiving, avowed that "bigness is not necessarily greatness"; adding, "if by remaining in the second rank of magnitude we can hold the front rank morally and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude."[635] But he had before used the term "greatness" without reserve as equivalent to "mere material magnitude"; and even in revising his doctrine, it seems, he must needs crave some sort of supremacy, some sense of the inferiority of the ma.s.s of mankind.

Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let us say that "the things that are most excellent" have no dependence on mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of 1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations--though it had to be a poet--who saw not hards.h.i.+p but happiness in the thought of "leaving great verse unto a little clan." And it was a Christian bishop, looking on the break-up of a great empire, who asked, _An congruat bonis latius velle regnare?_--Doth it beseem the good to seek to widen their rule?--and gave the judgment that if human things had gone in the happier way of righteousness, all States had remained small, happy in peaceful neighbourhood.[636]

As for the sentiment of a national greatness that is measured by acreage and census and quant.i.ty of war material, it is hard to distinguish ethically between it and that individual pride in lands and wealth which all men save those who cherish it are agreed to p.r.o.nounce odious. Even the sn.o.bs of nationality have, as a rule, a saving sense which withholds them from flaunting their pride in the eyes of their "poorer"

neighbours, the members of the less numerous communities. Yet the note which is thus tacitly admitted to be vulgarly jarring for alien ears is habitually struck for domestic satisfaction; few newspapers let many days pa.s.s without sounding it; and certain poets and writers of verse appear to find their chief joy in its vibrations. The men of some of the lesser States, then, stand a fair chance of becoming ethically and aesthetically, as well as intellectually, superior in the average to those of the larger aggregates, in that their moral codes are not vitiated nor their literary taste vulgarised by national purse-pride and the vertigo of the higher dunghill; though they, too, have their snares of "patriotism," with its false ideals and its vitiation of true fraternity.

To some degree, no doubt, the habit of mind of our megalophiles connects with the vague but common surmise that a small aggregate is more liable to unscrupulous aggression than a large one. If, however, there be any justice in that surmise, there is obviously implied a known disposition in the larger aggregates to commit such aggression; so that to act or rest upon it is simply to prefer being the wronger to being the wronged.

Thus to glory in being rather on the side of the bully than on the side of the bullied is only to give one more proof of the unworthiness of the instinct at work. All the while, there is no real ground for the hope; and as regards the small nations themselves, the apprehension does not appear to prevail. There has indeed been a recrudescence of the barbaric ethic of the Napoleonic period in the Bismarckian period; but there is no present sign of a serious fear of national suppression on the part of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Scandinavian States; while, apart from Bismarck's early aggression upon Denmark, and the ill-fortune of Greece in attacking Turkey, it is not small but large aggregates--to wit, Austria, France, Russia, Turkey, Spain--that have suffered any degree of military humiliation during the past half century; and it is precisely the large aggregates that avowedly live in the most constant apprehension either of being outnumbered in their armies and navies by single rivals or coalitions, or of losing their "prestige" by some failure to punish a supposed slight. It is a matter of historic fact that the "patriotic" consciousness in England had its withers wrung during a long series of years by the remembrance of such military disasters as the fall of Gordon at Khartoum, and the defeat of an incompetent general at Majuba Hill.[637] No "little nation" could exhibit a more wincing sense of humiliation and disgrace than is thus visibly felt by mult.i.tudes of a great aggregate over military repulses at the hands of extremely small and primitive groups. Politically speaking, then, the future of the small nations seems rather brighter than that of the large; and thus in the last a.n.a.lysis the pride of the unit of the latter is found to be still a folly.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 631: _The Expansion of England_, 1883, p. 1.]

[Footnote 632: This though it be true, as remarked by Sismondi (_Histoire des republiques italiennes_, ed. 1826, i, 100, 101), that all nations spontaneously desire to be large and powerful, in disregard of all experience.]

[Footnote 633: This, it need hardly be repeated, was written before 1900.]

[Footnote 634: Compare the remarks of Freeman, _History of Federal Government_, 2nd ed. p. 41.]

[Footnote 635: _Expansion of England_, p. 16. Compare the further vacillations in pp. 132-37, 301, 304, 306. In the concluding chapter (p.

294) comes the avowal that "we know no reason in the nature of things why a State should be any the better for being large."]

[Footnote 636: Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, iv, 15.]

[Footnote 637: This was written before 1900. The disasters of the South African War confirmed the proposition.]

CHAPTER II

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 const.i.tute 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 Nors.e.m.e.n pa.s.sing 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 ill.u.s.tration, it "syndicated" the multifold irregular activities of wors.h.i.+p, 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.

Compare the explicit admissions of Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ 8 cent., pt. ii, ch. ii, -- 5 and note, following on the testimony of William of Malmesbury as to Charlemagne. Other ecclesiastical historians coincide. "Numbers of the earliest and most active converts, both in Germany and England, were connected with the royal households; and in this way it would naturally occur that measures which related to the organising of the Church would emanate directly from the King.... It is indeed remarkable that so long as kings were esteemed the real patrons of the Church, she felt no wish to define exactly her relations to the civil power; the two authorities ... _laboured to enforce obedience to each other_" (Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, pp. 56-57).

The same historian (p. 127) describes the Wends of the eleventh century as seeing in the missionary a means for their subjection to Germany, and as "constantly attempting to regain their independence and extinguish the few glimmerings of truth that had been forced into their minds."

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 a.s.semblies 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 wors.h.i.+p 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]

Naturally the early Christian records gloss the facts. Thus it is told in the life of Anskar (Ancharius) that "the Swedes" sent messengers to the Emperor Ludovic the Pious (_circa_ 825) telling that "many" of them "longed to embrace the Christian faith"--a story for which the only possible basis would be the longings and perhaps the propaganda of Christian captives of some western European nationality. (Cp. Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, p. 110, _notes_, and p. 111.) Still it is admitted that the king was avowedly willing to listen; and the tale of the first acceptance of Christianity in Sweden, even if true in detail, would plainly point to a carefully rehea.r.s.ed plan under the king's supervision. The admission that afterwards there was a return to heathenism for nearly a century consists entirely with the view that the first tentative was one of kingly policy. See Geijer, c.

iii, pp. 34, 35. It was the people who drove out the missionaries; and Hardwick's statement that after seven years Anskar "was able to regain his hold on the affections of the Swedes" is confuted by his own narrative. All that Anskar obtained was a toleration of his mission; and this was given after a trial by lots, on heathen principles (Hardwick, pp. 112, 113; cp. p. 115). The account in Crichton and Wheaton's _Scandinavia_, 1837, i, 122, brings the king's initiative into prominence. (Cp. Otte, _Scandinavian History_, 1874, p. 34.) They also note that Charlemagne, in treating with the Danes, "did not attempt to impose his religion"

upon them; but they do not glimpse the true explanation, which is that he could gain nothing by helping to organise a hostile kingdom. In point of fact he refused to let Lindger pursue his purpose of converting the Northmen. (Hardwick, p. 108, _note 2_, citing _Vit. S. Lindger_.) He had not developed the devotion or the subservience to the Church which in later ages led emperors to force the acceptance of Christianity on a defeated State that remained otherwise independent.

When in a later age Christianity was definitely established in Sweden under Olaf the Lap (or Tribute) King (_circa_ 1000), whose father Erik is said to have been murdered in a tumult for his destruction of a pagan temple, the process was again strictly monarchic, the Diet resisting; but Olaf's substantial success was such as to permit of his annexing Gothland, temporarily conquering Norway, and styling himself king of all Sweden; and his son, Anund Jakob, continuing the profitable policy, earned the t.i.tle of Most Christian Majesty (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 111; Geijer, p. 39).

Even after this the attempt of a bishop (1067) to destroy the old temple at Upsala, resisted by the Christian King Stenkil, but supported by his rasher son Inge, caused the expulsion of the latter by the pagan party under Svend. Only after Inge's restoration by Danish help (1075) was the heathen wors.h.i.+p suppressed (Hardwick, p. 116).

As regards Denmark, the historians incidentally make it clear that Harald Klak, usurping king of Jutland (_circa_ 820), wanted to Christianise his turbulent subjects in order to subordinate them, having learned the wisdom of the policy from Louis the Pious; and it is no less clear that the same motive swayed Erik I, who, after having in his days of piratical adventure, as usurper of the Jute crown, destroyed the Christian settlement of Charlemagne at Hamburg, entirely changed his att.i.tude and favoured Christianity when, on the death of King Horda-Knut, he became king of all Denmark (Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 120-23).

So plain was the political tendency of the new creed that after the Christianisation of Denmark by Erik I the n.o.bility 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 sanct.i.ty, "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.

The spread of Christianity among the Franks; in England; in Saxony by Charlemagne; in North Germany later; and among the Wends, Poles, Hungarians, and Bohemians, constantly exhibits the same phenomena.

Always it is the duke or king who is "converted"; whereupon the people are either baptised in ma.s.s or dragooned for generations. A powerful king like Clovis could secure obedience; others, as in Scandinavia, Bohemia, and Wendland, lost life and kingdom in the attempt to crush at once paganism and local independence. Prussia was almost depopulated by sixty years of war before the Order of Teutonic Knights, who undertook to convert it on being awarded the territory, could extinguish by savagery its staunch paganism. The Christianisation of almost the whole of Northern Europe was thus a purely political process, accomplished in great part by the sword.

See Hardwick, _pa.s.sim_, and cp. the author's _Short History of Christianity_, pp. 211-16.

-- 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, fis.h.i.+ng, 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.

See, for instance, the _Roman de Rou_ (1160), ed. Andresen, 1877-79, i, 18, 19, verses 208-25 of prologue. Pluquet, in a note on the pa.s.sage in his edition (1827, i, 10), remarking that the usage is often mentioned, not only by Norman but by English and French annalists of the Middle Ages, adds that the oldest mention of all, in the _Tractatus_ of Abbot Odo (d. 942), must be rejected, the doc.u.ment being apocryphal. That, however, is not the oldest mention by a long way. Paulus Diaconus (740-99) gives the statement in a very circ.u.mstantial form (cited by Rydberg, _Teutonic Mythology_, Eng. tr. p. 68) in his history of the Longobardians, his own stock, who he says came from Scandinavia. He testifies that he had actually talked with persons who had been in Scandinavia--his descriptions pointing to Scania. M. Pluquet notes (so also Crichton and Wheaton, i, 166-67) that no northern saga mentions the usage in question. But it was likely to be commemorated only by the stocks forced in that fas.h.i.+on to emigrate.

The saga-making Icelanders were not among these. The old statement, finally, is in some measure corroborated by the testimony of Geijer, p. 84, as to the long subsistence of the Swedish practice of sending forth sons to seek their fortune by sea.

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 pa.s.sing from Gaul through Arab Spain (827) and along the Mediterranean coasts, north and south; another pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sumption that the others "failed," when in reality they helped to const.i.tute 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. Clemenceau 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 pract.i.tioners 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 a.s.sociations, 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.

Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton make the regulation statement that when Christianity was introduced into Scandinavia, "it corrected the abuses of an ill-regulated freedom; it banished vindictive quarrels and b.l.o.o.d.y dissensions; it put a restraint upon robberies and piracies; it humanised the public laws and softened the ferocity of public manners; it emanc.i.p.ated the peasantry from a miserable servitude, restored to them their natural rights, and created a relish for the blessings of peace and the comforts of life" (_Scandinavia_, i, 196). For the general and decisive disproof of these a.s.sertions it is necessary only to follow Messrs.

Crichton and Wheaton's own narrative, pp. 201, 213, 216, 219, 230, 240, 244, 247, 275, 278, 280, 308, 312, 322, etc., and note their contrary generalisation at pp. 324, 325. It was his "Most Christian Majesty" Anund Jakob who got the nickname of Coal-burner for his law that the houses and effects of malefactors should be burned to the value of the harm they had done. The Swedes, polygamous before Christianity, continued to be so for generations as Christians (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 197, 198, citing Adam of Bremen. Cp.

Grimm, _Geschichte der deutschen Sprache_, i, 18, 188.) Civil wars and ferocious feuds greatly multiplied in the early Christian period, apart altogether from pagan insurrections. Geijer, while erroneously attributing to Christianity the lessening of war between Scandinavia and the rest of the world, admits that the pa.s.sions of strife, "hitherto turned in an external direction, now spent themselves in a domestic field of action, generating civil discord and war. Christianity, besides, dissolved the effective bond of the old social inst.i.tutions" (p. 40). In that case it clearly cannot have been religious feeling that checked external war. As to piracy, that was later practised by Elizabethan Protestants and by the Huguenots of La Roch.e.l.le, when the opportunities were tempting. As to popular misery, it is told in the life of Anskar that the poor in ancient Sweden wore so few that the first Christians could find a use for their alms only in foreign countries (Geijer, p. 33). That difficulty has not prevailed since. Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton later admit that the Danish peasantry, free as pagans, "gradually sunk under the increasing power and influence of the feudal chiefs and the Romish hierarchy" (p. 227), and that the Crusades did not forward the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs in Denmark as elsewhere, the peasantry on the contrary sinking into "a state of hopeless bondage" (pp. 251, 252).

-- 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 cla.s.ses, 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 Lubeck, 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 n.o.bility 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.

Cp. Schweitzer, _Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_, i, 129.

The Swedish peasantry, like the Norwegian, were less easy to enslave than the Danish by reason of the natural conditions; those of the remote mountain and mining districts in particular retaining their independence (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 375, 376; Geijer, pp.

50, 81, 89, 97, 103), so that they ultimately enabled Gustavus Vasa to throw off the Danish yoke. Yet they had at first refused to recognise him, being satisfied with their own liberties; and afterwards they gave him much serious trouble (Otte, _Scandinavian History_, 1874, pp. 228, 235; Geijer, pp. 109, 112, 115, 116, 118, 120-24). Slavery, too, was definitely abolished in Sweden as early as 1335 (Geijer, pp. 57, 86; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 316, 333). As regards the regal power, the once dominant theory that the Swedish kings in the thirteenth century obtained a grant of all the mines, and of the province of the four great lakes (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 332), appears to be an entire delusion (Geijer, pp. 51, 52).

Such claims were first enforced by Gustavus Vasa (_id._ p. 129). As regards the clergy, they appear from the first, _qua_ churchmen, to have been kept in check by the n.o.bles, who kept the great Church offices largely in the hands of their own order (Geijer, p. 109), though Magnus Ladulas strove to strengthen the Church in his own interest (_id._ pp. 52-53). Thus the n.o.bles became specially powerful (_id._ pp. 50, 56, 108); and when in the fifteenth century Sweden was subject to Denmark, they specially resented the sacerdotal tyranny (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 356).

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 p.r.o.nounced "a wretched detail of civil wars, insurrections, and revolutions, arising princ.i.p.ally from the jealousies subsisting between the kings and the people, the one striving to augment their power, the other to maintain their independence."[670]