Montesquieu says:[324]—­

“The great prerogative of Scandinavia is, that it afforded the great resource to the liberty of Europe, that is, to almost all of liberty there is among men.  The Goth Jornandes calls the North of Europe the forge of mankind.  I would rather call it the forge of those instruments which broke the fetters manufactured in the South.”

Geijer, in his Swedish History, tells us:—­

“The recollections which Scandinavia has to add to those of the Germanic race are yet the most antique in character and comparatively the most original.  They offer the completest remaining example of a social state existing previously to the reception of influences from Rome, and in duration stretching onward so as to come within the sphere of historical light.”

We do not know how much of those old Northern ideas may be still mingled with our ways of thought.  The names of their gods we retain in those of our weekdays,—­Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.  Their popular assemblies, or Things, were the origin of our Parliament, our Congress, and our general assemblies.  If from the South came the romantic admiration of woman, from the North came a better respect for her rights and the sense of her equality.  Our trial by jury was immediately derived from Scandinavia; and, according to Montesquieu, as we have seen, we owe to the North, as the greatest inheritance of all, that desire for freedom which is so chief an element in Christian civilization.

Scandinavia proper consists of those regions now occupied by the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  The geographical peculiarity of this country is its proximity everywhere to the sea, and the great extent of its coast line.  The great peninsula of Sweden and Norway, with the Northern Ocean on its west, the Baltic and Gulf of Bothnia on its east, penetrated everywhere by creeks, friths, and arms of the sea, surrounded with innumerable islands, studded with lakes, and cleft with rivers, is also unrivalled, except by Switzerland, in the sublime and picturesque beauty of its mountains.  The other peninsula, that of Denmark, surrounded and penetrated also everywhere by the sea, differs in being almost level; rising nowhere, at its highest point, more than a thousand feet above the ocean.  Containing an area of only twenty-two thousand square miles, it is so penetrated with bays and creeks as to have four thousand miles of coast.  Like the northern peninsula, it is also surrounded with a multitude of islands, which are so crowded together, especially on its eastern coast, as to make an archipelago.  It is impossible to look at the map of Europe, and not be struck with the resemblance in these particulars between its northern and southern geography.  The Baltic Sea is the Mediterranean of Northern Europe.  The peninsula of Denmark, with its multitudinous bays and islands, corresponds to Greece, the Morea, and its archipelago.