Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/13

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PREFACE
ix

been struck during a visit to England with the efforts that were made there for the enlightenment of the poorer classes, and resolved to imitate them in Denmark.

This he did by the establishment of "High Schools" for the people, where he gathered together young men and maidens, for months at a time (the one sex in summer the other in winter), and by means of lectures, historical readings, and the singing of patriotic songs, saturated their minds with a love of their Fatherland and a knowledge of its glorious past. He put the old gods before them as the only natural and inevitable forerunners of Christianity, and constantly recited the Eddas and Sagas. The awakening of the spirit was his prime object, rather than the training of the intellect.

So successful were the High Schools that in a somewhat modified form they are now general all over Denmark, and in an address given at the opening of the new building of the Danish Students Society, in 1894, Georg Brandes said:— "If we wished to point out to a foreigner what was most remarkable in modern Denmark we should distinguish three things of National Origin," and the first of these is "the Peoples' High Schools."

This great institution, then, with its religious-political teaching, together with the outcome of the agitations of the "National-Liberal" party and the "Friends of the Peasants," form the