The Landsting (the Upper House) held a secret meeting. If a coalition ministry should not be arranged and the motion for a plebiscite should fail, there would certainly be a general election. This would, I thought, be fatal, as it would probably mean a postponement of the sale until after the close of the war. In the meantime, we heard the German representatives of the Hamburg-American Line at St. Thomas were carrying on 'some unusual improvements.' These activities, begun without the knowledge of the Governor, who was then in Denmark, were stopped by the Minister of Justice, Mr. Edward Brandès, when the knowledge of them was brought to the Danish Government. On August 15th I was convinced that one of the most important men in Denmark, indeed in Europe, Etatsraad H. N. Andersen, of the East Asiatic Company, approved of the sale. This I had believed, but I was delighted to hear it from his own lips.
Political confusion became worse. In some circumstances the Danes are as excitable as the French used to be. It looked, towards the end of August, as if the project of the sale was to be a means of making of Denmark, then placid and smiling under a summer sun, a veritable seething cauldron. The gentlemen of the press enjoyed themselves. I, who had the reputation of having on all occasions a bonne presse, fell from grace. I had not, it is true, concealed the truth by diplomatic means, as had Mr. Edward Brandès and Mr. Erik de Scavenius, but I had talked 'so much and so ingenuously' to the newspaper men, as one of them angrily remarked, that they were sure a man, hitherto so frank, had nothing to conceal; and yet there had been much concealed.
The Opposition, which would have been pleasantly horrified to discover any evidence of bribery, or, indeed, any evidence of the methods by which our Legation had managed its side of the affair (they hoped for the worst), could discover very little; when they called on de Scavenius to show all the incriminating documents in the case, they found there was nothing incriminating, and the documents were the slightest scraps of paper.
Knowing how far away our Department of State was, how busy and how undermanned, owing to the attitude which Congress has hitherto assumed towards it, I acted as I thought best as each delicate situation arose, always arranging as well as I could not to compromise my Government, and to give it a chance to disavow any action of mine should it be necessary. I had found this a wise course in the Cook affair. I had resolved to take no notice of Dr. Cook, until the Royal Danish Geographical Society determined to recognise him as a scientist of reputation.
When Commander Hovgaard, who had been captain of the king's yacht, asked me to go with the Crown Prince, President of the Geographical Society, to meet the American explorer, I went; but my Government was in no way committed. In fact, President Taft understood the situation well; receiving no approval of Dr. Cook from me, he merely answered Dr. Cook's telegram, congratulating him on 'his statement.' I must say that, when the Royal Geographical Society received Cook, no word of disapproval from any American expert had reached our Legation or the Geographical Society itself. The Society, with no knowledge of the Mount McKinley incident, behaved most courteously to an American citizen who appeared to have accomplished a great thing. The only indication that made me suspect that Dr. Cook was not scientific was that he spoke most kindly of all his—may I say it?—step-brother scientists! But, as I had accompanied the Crown Prince, in gratitude for his kind attention to a compatriot, I felt sure that a wise Department would only, at the most, reprimand me for exceeding the bounds of courtesy.
Suddenly a crashing blow struck us; Edward Brandès, in the midst of a hot debate, in which he and de Scavenius were fiercely attacked, announced that the United States was prepared to exert 'friendly pressure.' Brandès is too clever a man to be driven into such a statement through inadvertence; he must have had some object in making it. What the object was I did not know—nobody seemed to know. Even de Scavenius seemed to think he had gone too far, for whatever were the contents of Minister Brun's despatches, it was quite certain that neither he nor our Government would have allowed a threat made to Denmark involving the possession of her legitimately held territory to become public.
Something had to be done to avoid the assumption that we were no more democratic than Germany. 'We wanted the territory from a weaker nation; we were prepared to seize it, if we could not buy it! We Americans were all talking of the rights of the little nations. Germany wanted to bleed France, and she took Belgium after having insolently demanded that she should give up her freedom. We, the most democratic of nations, prepared to pay for certain Islands; but if it was not convenient for a friendly power to sell her territory, we would take it.' This was the inference drawn from Mr. Edward Brandès' words in Parliament. I could not contradict a member of the Government, and yet I was called on, especially by Danes who had lived in the United States, to explain what this 'pressure' meant.
Many Danish women who approved of the social freedom of American women, but mistrusted our Government's refusing them the suffrage, took the question up with me. 'Pressure et tu Brute!' The women were to vote in the plebiscite. Some of their leaders balked at the word 'pressure,' but a country which had hitherto refused the suffrage to American women was capable of anything. Mr. Edward Brandès had performed a great service to his country in letting out some of the horrors of our secret diplomacy. Mr. Constantin Brun, whose loyalty to his own country I invoked in these interviews, was, they said, 'corrupted' in the United States; he was more American than the Americans! I should have much preferred to be put in the 'Ananias Society' so suddenly formed of Mr. Brandès and Mr. de Scavenius than to have myself set down as an imperialist of a country as arrogant as it was grasping, which not only threatened to seize Danish territory, but which, while pretending to hold the banner of democracy in the war of nations, deprived the best educated women in the world (Mrs. Chapman Catt had said so) of their inalienable right to vote!
Fortunately, I had once lectured at the request of some of the leading suffragists. Bread cast upon the waters is often returned, toasted and buttered, by grateful hands. Madame de Münter—wife of the Chamberlain—and Madame Gad, wife of the Admiral, were great lights in the Feminist movement.
Madame Gad is a most active, distinguished and benevolent woman of letters. There were others, too, who felt that there must be some redeeming features in a condition of society which produced a Minister who was so devoted to woman suffrage as I was (as my wife gave some of the best dinners in Denmark, nobody expected her to go beyond that!). To Madame de Münter I owed much good counsel and a circle of defenders; to Madame Gad (if we had an Order of Valiant Women, I should ask that she be decorated), I am told I owe the chance that helped to turn the women's vote in our favour, and induced many ladies, who were patriotic traditionalists, to abstain from voting. The general opinion, as far as I could gauge it—and I tried to get expert testimony—was that the women's vote would be against us.