Swiss people

“ Some of the most glorious victories recorded in history have been gained by the little Swiss nation in defence of their beloved fatherland; the fame of Morgarten, Sempach, Grandson, and Morat is not likely to die out while European civilization lasts. Constitutionally the history of Switzerland is of surpassing interest. Step by step we have seen a handful of gallant people free themselves from oppression by emperor or duke, by prince or lord, by prelate or cloister. Inch by inch the people at large have gained their political rights from foreign overlords or from native aristocracies. ”

“ The Franco-German war, again, offered the Swiss many opportunities of showing their usual benevolence and charity towards distressed foreigners. To the Germans who had to leave France on the outbreak of war, making their way home through Switzerland, the Swiss people showed innumerable kindnesses, many of the people being poor, and destitute of even necessaries. And when they heard of the siege of Strasburg, their old friend and ally of centuries ago, the Swiss sent a deputation to invite the weak and tender to go home with them. ”

“ I can understand the anger which some people feel against the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord, and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen that you find there. ”

“ If the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed the glorious rise of the Swiss people, the seventeenth and eighteenth saw the political decline of the Republic. Even the Reformation itself led the way to this decline by lodging all power—political, fiscal, moral, and educational—in the Protestant cantons in the hands of the governments. ”

“ But the Swiss found it inconvenient to be reformed by strangers. The “Forest Cantons”—Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden—revolted, and in the end the French were as cordially detested as they had at first been cordially welcomed by the Swiss people, whose problem then was how to regain their independence. ”

“ And let me add, that any occupation which brings a foreigner into close contact with the more intelligent Swiss, especially at a time when they are not hard driven by the touring world of all nations, will give new life and interest to even the shortest visit to a country whose history and institutions are as wonderful as its scenery, or as its animal and vegetable life. We are apt to think of the Swiss as a self-seeking people, whose only object is to make capital out of the natural beauties of the extraordinary land they live in. ”

“ Is it that the living among these stupendous surroundings has somehow dwarfed the people, or has Nature, by one of her inimitable contrasts, made the human part of Switzerland so insignificant in order to set off the vastness of peak and snowfield? Certainly the glib commonplace that national character is influenced and formed by national surroundings is here gloriously contradicted, since, as far as I am aware, no Swiss has ever attained to eminence in anything. ”

“ Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Arnold—all had close associations with Switzerland, and there still continues to flow there a constant stream of the world's genius. It is everybody's playground, and seems to have the power to tempt the man of imagination to longer stay. One effect is to give to Swiss people of the better educated classes a curiously international knowledge. Many of them seem to know all languages and to study all contemporary literature. ”

“ Every once in a while one hears of some queer stupid outrage in Switzerland—the tires of an automobile chopped up or obstructions put at a dangerous turn in the road to upset a traveling carriage. I imagine it is always one of these quasi-deficients who is responsible for it.
In the whole world I do not know a finer people, nor one more charming to deal with, than the healthy, intelligent class of Swiss, God-fearing, law-abiding, domestic, industrious, [14] self-respecting, clean in mind and body. ”

“ Nearly all the Swiss I have seen are Catholics, and a more upright, kindly, truly religious people I have rarely or never met. What, then, can have rendered them so palpably and greatly superior to their Italian neighbors, whose ancestors were the masters of theirs, but the prevalence here of Republican Freedom and there of Imperial Despotism?
Switzerland, shut out from equal competition with other nations by her inland, elevated, scarcely accessible position, has naturalized Manufactures on her soil, and they are steadily extending. ”

“ We would be slow to believe that a population even of a few hundreds could hold on upon the sides of the mountains, or find the means of support among those green meadows, where lies the little village of Gersau, and there are only about 1,500 people in it. Yet so tenacious are these Swiss of independence, that this little, secluded, poor, portionless community, not more than two miles square, maintained its existence as a separate state for more than four centuries, and was then swallowed up by the French in the devouring fires of 1789. ”

“ She did not go back to Switzerland, because she very shortly married the precise young drygoods-clerk who wore the white cravat.
The Swiss are the most competent people on this globe of ours, which is round like an orange and slightly flattened at the poles. There is less illiteracy, less pauperism, less drunkenness, more general intelligence, more freedom in Switzerland than in any other country on earth. ”

“ Its columns are filled with long accounts of the doings of Swiss shooting clubs and gymnastic societies. Yet Swiss trading and professional people are, in the general rule, astonishingly well versed in foreign languages and foreign literature. Offering asylum as it does to political and social rebels of all countries, Switzerland is a kind of international clearing-house94 for thought. The Gallic, the Teutonic, the Slavonic new thought of the day—all are understood and discussed in Switzerland, and the Swiss book-shops are the most cosmopolitan and representative in the world. ”

“ They are not idle, nor dissipated, nor away from home. They are at work, and in the house, not tending the baby, nor baking the bread, nor washing the clothes; but they are industrious, and what are they at? The Swiss are a frugal, saving, thriving people. The amount of arable land is not enough to meet their wants. ”

“ In later stages mountains interfere greatly with the development of the machinery of civilisation. Always, too, mountain air sharpens the appetite rather than the wits, and there are some diseases attacking particularly the brain which are almost peculiar to mountain districts.
The Swiss, then, have to be considered justly rather in the light of a handicapped than of a favoured people. Their one favouring national circumstance is that their central position in regard to the great plains of Europe has put them13 in the track of all the chief currents of civilisation. ”

“ The Swiss seem to regard life as if they were a little oppressed by its cares and labours. Perhaps the conditions of existence on their side of the mountains are so hard, that the people must take things seriously. One respects their laborious industry. There is a kind of manliness in their never-ending struggle against the niggardliness and severity of nature. ”

“ HERO OF SWITZERLAND WILLIAM TELL ADAPTED BY H.E. MARSHALL I GESSLER'S TYRANNY
Far away in the heart of Europe there lies a little country called Switzerland. It seems wonderful that when great and powerful kings and princes swept over the world, fighting and conquering, little Switzerland should not have been conquered and swallowed up by one or other of the great countries which lay around. But the Swiss have always been a brave and fearless people. ”

“ From the specifically Swiss point of view, it aims at creating a blind patriotism, which can neither enlighten nor guide the understanding; it monotonously reiterates the story of wars, victories, and brute force, instead of teaching liberty, instead of inculcating the lofty Swiss ideal; it cares nothing for the moral and material needs of the people of to-day. ”

“ The Swiss, however, are a small, and a poor people, whose affairs are, in the main, managed locally. They have no need of trained statesmen; they have no haute politique. Speaking generally, they are a nation of peasant-proprietors, artisans, manufacturers, and tradesmen. At present, in many parts of the country, the only tritons among the minnows are the innkeepers. Manufactures, which mean also commerce, are, here and there, introducing a moneyed class ”

“ The Swiss are an Artless people.
“What more worthy people! Whose every Alpine gap yawns with tradition, and is stocked with noble story, yet, the perverse and scornful one (Art) will none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box.”
Whistler.
The inhabitants of Switzerland are the most Moral and Patriotic people in the World and their army is second to none in bravery and won the World War.
[Pg 113]
CHAPTER XXXIII MONACO
Monaco is the centre of the spinning industry of the world. ”

“ Some idea, then, we may form of the people of Switzerland in prehistoric times, those times when the fair-haired Achæans were settling in the Hellenic peninsula the issue between themselves and an earlier Canaanitish race, and giving prompting to the stories of the Homeric legends. Celtic migrants, making their way along the great watercourses of Europe, had come to these Swiss lakes resting at the feet of the Alps, and had found there prompting to settle and to begin to cultivate a community life. ”

“ Zurich, now the greatest authority on the subject in Switzerland, the lakemen left their watery settlements about the date just given, and began to fix their habitations on terra firma. Various tombs already found on land would bear witness to this change. When these peculiar people had once come on shore to live they would be gradually absorbed into neighbouring and succeeding races, no doubt into some of the Celtic tribes, and most likely into the Helvetian peoples. Thus they have their part, however small it may be, in the history of the Swiss nation. ”

“ The organisation of the national services, posts, roads, railways, etc., is also shaped to secure the greatest degree of comfort possible for the small land-holders. It is a wise policy. These rustic people, living almost exclusively on their own resources, eating food which they have produced, wearing clothes which they have spun, demanding so little from the outside world, are93 the very backbone of the Swiss nation, and they are the rock-foundations of the national patriotism. The Swiss are not bound together by the ties of a common race, a common language, a common religion. ”

“ The Swiss Confederation
Switzerland becomes a separate country; mixed nationality of its people.
Various districts in the neighborhood successively joined the Swiss union, and even the region lying on the Italian slopes of the Alps was brought under its control. Gradually the bonds between the members of the union and the empire were broken. ”

“ The Swiss are a stirring and business-like people, and had already in the first half of the present century carried their enterprises abroad, especially in the principal seaports. As early as 1812, Egg, a citizen of Zurich, took two hundred operatives, and started a cotton factory at Piedimonti, near Naples, notwithstanding the blockade, the machinery being taken by way of Trieste and the Adriatic. ”

“ Its people speak four different languages; they believe in different religions; the government is not alike in different parts; yet the Swiss states are bound together by a bond stronger than unity of language or creed can possibly make. ”

“ The Swiss have similar feelings as to those of their families whom cretinism has reduced to idiocy. They are attended to, fed, dressed clean, and provided with a pleasant place for the day, before doing anything else, even by very busy and poor people. ”

“ The history of French Switzerland has not yet been touched upon, and that for good reasons. It is difficult to realize that down even to the sixteenth century the French Swiss were still languishing under the ancient forms of feudalism, and this at a time when their German brethren had long been enjoying the blessings of national independence, and had filled the world with their military renown. But, in truth, the French were slow to awaken to republican freedom, and looked to East Switzerland rather than to themselves for deliverance from political bondage. ”

“ He thought of his old nurse and her tales of the Alpine scenery, and of the knolls and vales of his own home. It is no wonder that the Swiss are free and brave and strong. The waterfalls, cliffs, and cloud-piercing mountains fill the soul with a sense of grandeur and glory which tends toward great deeds and fervent patriotism. Who can recall the eternal snows, the towering shafts of rock, the roaring caverns, and sweetest of blue lakes, without the most thrilling emotions! If there are any travellers upon whom the memory of Switzerland brings no such feelings, they are the exceptions. ”

“ I am old"—he was seventy—"and my task is heavy, for the enemy is powerful, but I trust I shall carry on my mission in the name of the God of our Rütli, who has never ceased to protect our Fatherland." Such has ever been and ever will be the love of the Swiss for their native soil, a love [Pg 402] not based merely on the beauty of their land, nor on the perfection of its institutions, but on the knowledge that it is a stronghold of noble freedom, and one of their own rearing. ”