Twenty-five years ago, the circumspection and the international aloofness of the Scandinavian peoples were well judged and of great service, writes Theodor formerly Editor of the "Berliner platt" in the Manchester Not that the Russians had invaded mark." The question of the hour for Sweden, the greatest of the Scandinavian States, was whether to abandon neutrality and come into the war on Germany's side, as it was hoped in Germany that she would do and as a few "Activists" in Sweden considered that she should do. In Sweden and Norway at the time there was an unmistakable sense of racial community with Germany, but it aroused no violent emotions, and it had nothing whatever in common with the exploded cliches of Pan-Germanism. This slightly romantic, rather vague feeling of modern origin (the Swedes of Gustavus Adolphus would not have gone into the Thirty Years War on the strength of any supposed racial affinity), did not in the least prevent the Scandinavian democracies from valuing their liberties more highly than the institutions and the ideas of government of the powerful empire across the Baltic.
When war began in 1914 there were bad psychologists in Berlin who counted on family sympathies and thought they would be able to rouse the Swedish people out of their placidity and induce them to play an active part, But the great majority of the Swedes preferred neutrality. The leading figure in the Hammerskjöld Cabinet was Wallenberg, the Minister of Finance, a cautious financier rather than a creative statesman with big ideas, and he prudently set a brake on the eagerness of the "Activists" and prevented the country from slipping into disaster.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.