the foreign officials, made sooner or later the war-arrow fly from farm to farm; and the king was confronted with an armed rebellion. Again and again the obnoxious magistrates, who had imagined that these sturdy mountaineers were as meek and long-suffering as their Danish brethren, were mercilessly beaten, maimed, or killed. Repeatedly the government was forced to concede to rebels what they had not yielded to supplicants. Unpopular laws were revoked, oppressive burdens removed, and promises made of improved administration. [Footnote A: Prof. J. E. Sars: "Norge under Foreningen med Danmark." Nordisk Universitets-Tidskrift for 1858 and 1861.] And yet, in spite of these ameliorating circumstances, Norway's condition during the Danish rule was miserable. The revenues of the country were spent in Copenhagen, and the people were heavily taxed to support a foreign court and a hungry brood of foreign officials, whose chief interest was to fill their own pockets. Danish nobles married into the great Norwegian families, and secured, by bribery and intrigue in Copenhagen, a virtual franchise for unlimited ill-doing. Great estates were accumulated in the hands of men like Vincentz Lunge, Hartvig Krummedike, and Hannibal Sehested, and the courts were prostituted to favor the land-grabbing schemes of noble adventurers. The public spirit which, in times of old, had jealously watched over the interests of the realm, had already been weakened by the incipient despotism of the last national kings; and what there was left of it now gradually expired. A most striking proof of this is the fact that when, in 1537, Norway lost the last vestige of her independence, being declared to be a province of Denmark, the decree was accepted without protest, and caused no perceptible excitement. So gradually had the change taken place, that no one was surprised. The same peasants who boldly resented any encroachment upon their personal rights and killed the magistrate who overtaxed them, heard without a murmur of the extinction of their nationality. It has been surmised, as a cause of their lethargy, that they did not hear of it--at least, not simultaneously, but gradually and casually, in the course of years; and it is not improbable that the imperfect means of communication was responsible for their apparent acquiescence. No attempt will be made in the following pages to relate the history of Denmark, except in so far as it directly affected that of Norway, and the plan of the present work excludes any but the most general characterization of the social conditions. The story of the Union will, therefore, be disproportionately short.