322 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
regardless of geographical, ethnical, or historical affinities ; and that the integrity of any nation capable of independence ought ideally to be safeguarded against attacks from without, and the right acknowledged of any part of such nation, forcibly cut loose from the mother-stem, to cherish a hope of, and by fair means work for, a reunion.
However, this may be debatable ground. In the meantime the burden of proof respecting Denmark as an intellectual dependency rests with the Germans. So far no evidence has been forthcoming. The best-informed among them concede the impossibility of furnishing it, the contention itself being untenable.
Nothing in reality could be farther from the truth. In a brief glance at the various aspects of the national culture of the Danes, let us first look at
I. The language. Here the analogy from Holland which, by the way, has never shown any pronounced anxiety to join its fortune with that of the Prussian household will be found to be no analogy at all, because, while Dutch sustains a similar relation to German as, say, Portuguese to Spanish, Danish can with no more right be regarded as a branch of German than English could be classed as a Romance language on account of the Latin elements it contains.
True, the two are akin. Both spring from the same Gothic parent-stem. Many roots they have in common. A direct descendant of Old Norse, Danish was more than the other Scandinavian idioms exposed to Germanic influences owing to adjacency of territory and close commercial relations. This propinquity has naturally left its mark on the vocabulary of the language. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was as yet in its swaddling-clothes as a literary medium, the indifference of a semi-German court and a foreign-bred aris- tocracy caused it to be swamped by a flood of German and French importations. Although this current was dammed before it had wrought irremediable havoc, it goes without saying that the elements thus absorbed during its formative stages became so deeply ingrained in its very organism that later attempts at
