Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/313

 THE NORTH SLESWIC QUESTION 3 I

whether or not they understand the language in which the charges against them are being preferred. Actors from Denmark cannot obtain permission to produce their plays even vaudevilles of the most harmless sort on North Sleswic stages, and are expelled if they do not, immediately upon their arrival, report to the police. The same fate is in store for Danish lecturers, no matter what their topics literary or religious. A lecture on the sun and planets announced by a Sleswic man was prohibited by the local magistrate on the ground that the stereopticon views by which it was to be illus- trated might present pictures of Danish persons and landscapes!

Entrance is forced into meetings of agricultural or charitable societies, and the audience dispersed without explanation, or on the pretense that the assemblage has a "political" character. Sometimes the hall is closed, the organization forcibly dissolved, and its papers carried off, in which case it takes a lawsuit to reopen. When the "political" proclivities of the gathering are only suspected, all women are chased out of the room, the guardians of Prussia's public morals considering it their province to suppress with severity any incipient desire on the part of the fair sex to cultivate an interest in affairs of state.

The flying of the Danish flag is, of course, interdicted. But a man may not even paint his fence-posts or his weathercock in the Danish colors (red and white). A red-and-white emblem on a book-cover will subject the whole edition to confiscation. Red and white flowers cannot with impunity be put on a family grave in the cemetery. Even a conspicuous preference for these shades in one's dress is regarded as an act of treason.

Parents have been fined for refusing to let their children attend the special services held in all Prussian schools on the anniversary of the battle at Sedan, in commemoration of the German victory over the French. A fine has been imposed for the illumination of the windows in a private residence in honor of some Danish celebration ; another on an editor for announ- cing in his paper that "today is King Christian's birthday" without adding the words "of Denmark." A farm hand of Danish sympathies called a German swineherd a "swine king"