[Sidenote: _Unauthorized accusations against Sweden for endeavouring to gain the supremacy._]
The accusations against Sweden for endeavouring to acquire the supremacy have, time after time, arisen from a mixture of various matters, partly the different conceptions of the legal character of the existing Union, partly the different programmes for the reformation of the Union.
Owing to the very indistinct and confused wording in the legal documents of the Act of Union the Swedish and Norwegian conceptions of the Union itself have finally become so antagonistic to each other, that the unionistic transactions have, in an excessive degree, taken the character of a continual judicial process, and the real questions have been more or less ignored[2:2]. Swedish Policy on its part has always maintained that Sweden's supremacy in the Union is based on legal grounds. It has especially insisted that the administration of Foreign affairs was, from the first, placed in Sweden's hands[2:3], and this Swedish standpoint has also been acknowledged as the right one by the most eminent of Norwegian writers on State law[3:1]. But of late those on the Norwegian Left Side have made stronger and stronger efforts to prove, that the order existed on no legal grounds, that Norway, as a Sovereign Kingdom, had the right, for instance, to create an entire Foreign Office of its own. And under this influence the Norwegian sensitiveness has in Sweden's defence of her conception of Union Law persisted more and more in seeing insulting »designs of supremacy».
Meanwhile future prospects and reform programmes have had little to do with the Swedish conception of the legal character of the Union. The most extreme representatives of the so-called supremacy partizans--to mention one, the late professor OSCAR ALIN--have on different occasions maintained reform programmes, built on the principle of perfect equality within the Union, and it must be asserted that _no Swedish political party in recent times has refused perfect equality to Norway_[3:2].
[Sidenote: _The different programmes of Sweden and Norway for reforming the Union._]
That the result seems to become the rupture of the Union, and not the reorganization of the same has depended on more and more insurmountable oppositions in opinions concerning _the manner_ and _the aim_ for a reform.