Far from there, in comfortable Denmark, where the peasants are short and round but none the less zealous readers of newspapers and earnest politicians, I met a certain self-confident Sören Sörensen in a third-class railway coupé who bestowed on me the honouring epithet of “intelligent young lady,” because I let him know of my acquaintance with Björnson. Björnson’s name was a sure letter of recommendation among the peasantry of the three Scandinavian countries. It is not very long since he spoke in Jutland in favour of arbitration, universal disarm-ment and public peace, and with his usual cunning, called upon his old antagonists, the pastors, to help him in the name of their religion in the great work of peace. His name had been sufficient to collect around him no less than thirty thousand listeners, even in those years of the apathy and despondency of the Danish people. What is the cause of this immense influence? I can explain it in two sentences. It is that in him the peasantry recognise their own flesh and blood, and that he stimulates the middle class. The class distinctions of central Europe have simplified themselves in the north. There is scarcely any social democracy and no great industrial class, their place is occupied by the peasantry as a political power and by the provincial middle class as the rulers in business. Björnson himself was born a peasant, but became a bourgeois in his early youth. In the next generation the sons of peasants who became authors were careful to avoid the middle class. But on the other hand there is annually a by no means inconsiderable percentage of the peasantry who go over into the middle class because it is more highly educated. Among these are pastors, gymnasium teachers, doctors, lawyers, merchants--yes, and rich peasant proprietors as well. The provincial _bourgeoisie_ of the north represents what is perhaps the purest type of that decadence of the middle classes which has declared itself throughout the whole of Europe; it is totally unlike the Scandinavian peasantry, which possesses a healthy strength, the reverse of social democracy, and embodies the power of a rising class. The great European upheaval of 1848 barely touched this Scandinavian _bourgeoisie_ with its narrow horizon, its commercial self-satisfaction, its snivelling morality, its mania for conventionalities, its love of stagnation, its small-minded, starved nature and hypocrisy against which Ibsen, the revolutionary bourgeois, has raised the scorpion whip, and Björnson, the peasant’s son, has preached in his reform writings, preached against it and its middle class views of life, though at the same time he always looked upon it as the highest normal condition.