Internally, Norway was from far-off times till quite recently a people of fisher-farmers prizing individual property on the small cultivable ledges beside the fjords, and leading cattle to summer pastures on the high grasslands of the great mountain plateau. The practice of inheritance by the first-born son is traditionally associated with these little farms so difficult to subdivide, and the long-continued absences of much of the male part of the population (fishing) are another feature. The latter fact is said to be accountable for the unique power of women in Norwegian affairs, and the women have certainly contributed much to the modern development of Norway as a pacific, self-reliant democracy. In the twentieth century there has already been a great growth of industry based on the hydro-electric power available in such quantity in the fjords; the chemical industry, including the preparation of nitrates from atmospheric nitrogen, is a feature. Since the war the value of Norwegian currency has gone down with the slackness of shipping and the inability of Germany to trade as she used to do, but the depreciation is not very great, and may well right itself if the war-clouds clear. Fish and timber have long been, and are likely to remain, valuable commercial assets; the need of imported cereals is a permanent difficulty. At the back of Norway, on the high mountain plateau, are the {56} Lapps, whose seasonal wanderings disregard the international frontier between Norway and Sweden. Fortunately, therefore, when Sweden and Norway gave up (in 1905) their artificial and temporary union, it was mutually agreed, as became enlightened peoples, that the frontier would be entirely demilitarized. The separation coincided with a great development of Norway's trade, based upon the application of hydro-electric power to industry. The Norwegian people centuries ago seemed to be giving up their language for Danish, but here, as in so many other countries (Bohemia, Serbia, Finland, Flanders, Catalonia, and Wales), the nineteenth century brought a resurgence of local speech, and the work of Bjornsen and Ibsen gave that speech a literary standard, and made its literature a power in the modern world, fortunately with comparatively little development of international antagonism, for by this time there was no language competing locally with Norwegian; Danish had retired and Swedish was too far off to matter seriously, though its pressure was at one time threatened.