DANISH NEUTRALITY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1512, 19 February 1916, Page 2

DANISH NEUTRALITY.

In a defence of the Danish attitude during the war, Mr Axel Gerfalk, a Danish journalist, resident in London, says “When the war broke out, the Danish Farmers’ Co-operative Societies, which control the export of the greater part of our agricultural products, decided to keep allegiance with their old customer. Many temptations were put in the way of the Danish co-operative farmers. They were offered higher prices from Germany, they were guaranteed a fixed percentage above any price offered them from England, but they did not swerve from their decision to remain loyal to their old customer, England, and I often wonder in these disloyal limes if the farmers in any neutral country, given the same opportunity, would have resisted the temptation of sailing their goods where higher prices were obtainable. It is no secret in Denmark that many British firms cancelled their Danish contracts or ordered their Copenhagen representatives to sell their butter or bacon or eggs in the open market. One need not be a Sherlock Holmes to guess : where commodities of this kind, turned loose on the open market, are going to. The plainest of plain business men cannot be in doubt of that. But are the Danes to blame ? The Danish neutrality may not be a very glorious attitude, but -m are numerically too small a nation .to afford a more heroic one. I am not going to say that we are too proud to fight. It would be true no more than saying 1 that we are cowards. The truth is that the spirit of the Vikings is with us no longer. Our fighting days, I believe, are over. Our soldiers fought bravely when they attempted, in 1864, to bar the united forces of Germany and Austria from inundating all Den-1 mark. They fought, however, with no joy In their hearts; even,

German historians admit that the German losses were three times those of the Danish whenever it came to hand-to-hand fighting, and the stolid Danish peasants had the opportunity of using the bayonet or the butt-end of their rifles. We Danes are neutral and wish to remain neutral and have a right to remain neutral, because we, single-handed, fought the first act of this war drama. That is our official and national attitude, and nothing will make us swerve from that policy.”