THE LAKE OF ZURICH--RAPPERSWYL--GLARUS--THE LINTHTHAL--THE PANTENBRÜCKE.
Sharp-pressing Need, that spurs
The poor man’s wits, and Work that robs from sleep
And pleasure their due hours, outbraves and beats
Hard Nature’s oppositions.--_Adapted from_ VIRGIL.
_August 18._--At mid-day left the mediævalism of Einsiedln to take the
rail at Rapperswyl for manufacturing Glarus. Were hardly out of the
town when we came upon railway cuttings and viaducts in construction.
The iron horse, then, will soon be panting and snorting in, and
hurrying into and out of, this great and famous resort of peasant
pilgrims. It is not long before you are looking down on the lake
of Zurich, and its pleasant, well-peopled shores. At Einsiedln all
was damp grass, generally poor enough, with very little wood, and
very little variety of outline, and no variety of culture--a dreary,
monotonous, saddening scene. But now everything is changed completely.
Before us are land and water, mountains and plains, variety of outline,
variety of culture, variety of objects, variety of life. You are
among orchards and meadows, cornfields and vineyards. You look down
over them to the blue lake. Beyond the lake, on its further side,
reaching far right and left, is a broad expanse of undulating ground.
In this expanse, every here and there, a house is showing, very white
and cheery, among the dark green trees and the light green grass--the
houses of well-to-do people. You think they have been built, most of
them, by professional men, or owners of factories, or shops, in Zurich,
Rapperswyl, or some neighbouring town. They are rewards of patient
industry, and of well-directed intelligence. All nature is basking in,
and absorbing, and being quickened by, the warm sunshine. Grass is
growing, grapes are colouring, fruit is ripening, corn maturing. Your
mind is stirred. It is full of pictures, and each picture is full of
pleasant meanings. But all the meanings of all the pictures, in their
simplest expressions, come to this, that, in the charming scene you
have before you, there are many indications of much earthly happiness,
issuing from the exercise of the earthly virtues of industry, honesty,
and frugality; and from the practice of allowing to others what you
would wish should be allowed to yourself.
And so you reach the margin of the lake opposite Rapperswyl. Here is a
long spit of land projecting into the lake. You drive to the extremity
of this, and cross to Rapperswyl by a wooden bridge, three quarters
of a mile in length. I do not know whether there is width enough for
two carriages to cross each other, but I thought that there was not.
It has no side rails to prevent your fancying that you may fall into
the water. The planks of the roadway are not fastened; but as they are
thick, and set close together, they cannot dance out of their places.
At Rapperswyl took the rail. One does not wish to be much on the rail
in Switzerland; and there is not much of it, as yet, in the parts that
are worth going to see. But an occasional change in one’s mode of
locomotion is pleasant; and so is it at times to do a day’s work in an
hour. Pleasant, too, is it, or you fancy it so, as you sit at ease, to
have the mountains passing before you in a moving panorama. To be sure,
you cannot act upon the inspiration of the moment, which you hold to be
one of the merits of walking; but, then, you make answer to yourself
that this does not matter, where one is not particularly desirous of
making leisurely inspections. This, however, was not precisely the case
to-day, for at Wesen, where from the railway carriage you command a
view down the lake of Wallenstadt, and see that the mountains enclosing
it are very precipitous, and have a curiously brindled appearance
from the colour of their strata, and the fashion in which they are
streaked with dark woods; and when you hear of interesting communities
with large flocks and herds on their summits; you do wish to stop for
a little leisurely inspection. And this wish is real, for it gives
rise to a sensation in your feet as if they wanted to be climbing,
just as your flesh creeps when your mind is scared in looking over a
precipice. But you have in your pocket a ticket for Glarus, and your
plans were settled to be there this evening; and so you do not stop
for the Wallensee, but go on to Glarus. If there was any loss in this,
the moral is not that the railway was bad, but that minute plans,
and unchangeable plans, are bad; as must be everything, whether in
travelling or in anything else, which curtails advantages, and deprives
one of a pleasure.
As soon as your back is turned on the Wallensee, and your face set
southward for Glarus, you find that the railway is running in a narrow
valley, parallel to and below the embankment of the Linth. Unmistakable
factories now begin to appear on the scene: large rectangular
buildings, of many storeys; all white, for they are built of undressed
stone, which is then plastered smooth, and whitewashed; which whitewash
there is no smoke here to tarnish, although you will occasionally see
the familiar tall chimney-stalk; for some of these Glarus factories use
steam as an auxiliary power. These chimney-stalks, with no accessible
coal nearer than the mines of Belgium and of the west bank of the
Rhine, invite you to think of the moral causes of national and of
individual prosperity. The factories become more numerous. The valley
narrows. The mountains increase in steepness and in height. The line
terminates in a mountain _cul de sac_; and here is the busy-thriving
little town of Glarus, the nucleus of a hive of human industry.
From the station to the Glärner Hof is but a few steps. There are in
this manufacturing canton some peculiarities in the administration of
the Almends, brought about in the Commune of Glarus by the necessity
it was under of raising funds for rebuilding the town, after the
great fire, which destroyed it in the year 1861; and still more, both
here and elsewhere in the canton, from the large increase of the
operative population: and it was for the purpose of enquiring into
these peculiarities that I had come to Glarus. I had not far to go
for the commencement of the enquiry. In the centre of the town is a
large open space of ground, of a rudely triangular shape: it is an
acute-angled triangle, with a base of 150 yards, or so. This is on
the side of the road opposite to the Glärner Hof. The apex of the
triangle is about 300 yards, or more, off. This is one of the Almends
of Glarus. Ammer paced for me some of the allotments. These, we found,
contained, each, as many klafters as would give to each allottee about
the tenth of an acre. Hardly any space is lost for paths, which are
reduced to a minimum both of fewness and of width. But a practised
eye makes out at a glance the extent of each allotment; and infers
from its condition, and the way in which it is cropped, something of
the character of its occupant. Some were tidy; some were untidy. The
latter preponderated. This proportion would have been reversed, if the
allotments, instead of being temporarily occupied, had been the private
property of their cultivators. Some of the occupiers were rigidly
practical. This might, in some cases, mean that they were indisposed to
give themselves the trouble of a little thought and arrangement. These
devoted their whole space to potatoes. Others, who regarded the _pot
au feu_ with more of science--though, however, science is the ground
of the highest form of practice--or, at all events, with more regard
for gastronomy--but gastronomy is a science--assigned little spaces
to several kinds of herbs and vegetables; onions, cabbages, haricots,
beet, turnips, &c. The general look of the thing was not quite the same
as in our labourers’ allotments. They run very much on wheat. There
was no wheat here. What was most obtruded on the eye, from its height,
were the patches of sticked haricots. These our people, not from a
difference of climate, but from an ignorance of cookery, know nothing
about. Generally there was a far greater variety of cultivation on the
land than with us. This indicated a more _savant_ cultivation of the
stomach, or, at least, of the palate.
This Almend, in the middle of the town, is interesting, not so much for
the sake of such observations as I have just been making, as from its
being possible to regard it as an element in the lives of operatives,
who are successfully competing, under some disadvantages, with the
operatives of Mulhouse, Lille, Manchester, and Lowel. I will not say
that, in these days of railways, and of education, which we may hope
is becoming general, nothing of the kind is possible in the case of
the operatives of Manchester; but will here content myself with the
remark, that its effect must be good on these Glarus operatives. They
work eleven hours a day, including one for meals; therefore this garden
work is not carried on at the expense of their factory work. They are
burgers of the commune, and settle for themselves their hours of work,
in their yearly assemblies. As, then, the garden work is carried on,
with no detriment to the factory work, we may, without having any _per
contra_ deductions to make, attempt to estimate its advantages. It
is a healthy, pleasing, natural, and profitable employment of their
spare time. It is a save-all of their odds and ends of time, in which
their wives and children can take a part. It is a mental, as well as
a bodily, diversion from the uninteresting and monotonous work of the
factory. It varies in-door with out-door work, and so lightens it.
It prevents their being cut off from the teachings of Nature. Nature
teaches those who solicit her bounty in many ways. They discover
on what conditions she rewards those who solicit that bounty with
knowledge and importunity. They are brought to conform their practice
and their feelings to those conditions; to take into consideration the
chances that attend their best directed efforts; and to bear the little
disappointments, as well as to rejoice over the little successes,
incidental to the cultivation of the soil. It is a corrective, to some
extent, of some of the bad teaching, and bad effects, incidental to
life in a factory.
The occupation of these tenths of an acre is rent-free, because the
land is the common property of the burgers of Glarus, that is to say
of the operatives themselves; and this is the way in which they decide
on using it. But the produce of this small amount of land cannot be
so considerable as to enable them to live on wages lower than would
be possible without it. We must not, therefore, look to it as in any
degree, directly, affecting wages, and so the price of the muslins
of Glarus. Besides, the wages of these garden-cultivating operatives
of Glarus are the same as the wages of their fellow-operatives, who,
not being descendants of old burgers, but immigrants, or descendants
of immigrants, have, of course, no share whatever in the Almends, or
common lands. The wages of factory hands range for men from two and
a half to five francs a day, and for women from one franc. This, of
course, is less than with us. And as to their other advantage, the
water power, here chiefly used, it is not so cheap as it might appear,
for it has, to some extent, to be supplemented with steam-power, the
coal for which is brought from a great distance. While on the other
side is to be set the expense of bringing the raw cotton from Havre,
Antwerp, or Bremen, and of transporting again, by land carriage, down
to the coast, the manufactured goods destined for beyond sea markets in
the Levant, and elsewhere. The care I saw the hands bestowing upon what
they were engaged on, led me to think that the success of the Glarus
manufacturers might in part be attributed to the economical value of
moral causes. If so, it might be profitable to enquire how far these
moral causes result from these operatives being burgers, and descended
from an immemorial line of burgers, that is to say from their having
been brought up under the influence of the strongest of all self-acting
inducements to self-respect; and also, though in a minor degree, from
the habits of thought, as well as of life, the cultivation of their
little bits of land engenders.
It was a bright quiet afternoon, as we walked about the town, taking
note of how clean and well-constructed it was; and what numbers of
houses of well-to-do people, what a goodly town hall, what a fine
school, built for 700 scholars, what well-furnished shops it had,
for a population of 5,000. All this had been done by the public
spirit, intelligence, and industry of the little community. Had it
remained the capital of a canton, which, in such a situation, was only
agricultural and pastoral, it would have been no more than an untidy
and insignificant village. The intelligence of its manufacturers,
who have had to turn very slender advantages to what account they
could, and who have had to overcome many disadvantages, and who are
entertaining relations with so many distant parts of the world, must,
of course, in a still greater degree be in advance of what would be
the mental condition of the place, if agriculture had remained its
only employment. It is manufactures that have rebuilt with stone,
in a substantial, even imposing, and well-ordered form, the Glarus
of wood that was destroyed by the fire of 1861. This improvement of
its exterior indicates, for it is the result of it, a corresponding
improvement of the inner Glarus of to-day--of the modern manufacturing
and commercial city--to that of the old agricultural and pastoral
Glarus.
While we were walking over the town, and noting these matters, the
atmosphere was in that condition in which a cloud-banner is formed
at the summit of lofty mountains. It appears to be set up upon, and
to be flying over, their topmost peaks. Both the Glarnish and the
Schilt, which look down on this little hive of industry, had, on
this afternoon, their cloud-banners flying in the otherwise clear
atmosphere. All was quiet when, towards evening, we returned to
our hotel; and so it was when we retired to bed. But, soon after
midnight, we were roused from sleep by a violent banging of the outer
window-shutters, which we heard going on not only in the hotel, but
also in the neighbouring houses, and by the sound from the street of
hurrying feet, and by the shouting, I suppose, of the night-watchmen.
The Föhn, a violent wind, engendered by local causes, that at times
sweeps through the valley of the Linth, was rushing by. The laws
of Glarus enact, that, when it blows, every fire in the place, for
whatever purpose used, is to be extinguished. I rose, and made fast the
outer jealousy shutters of the room I was occupying. In the morning
all was quiet again. The wind, however, had been succeeded by, or
had brought with it, and left behind it, heavy rain, which continued
all that day, and till the morning of the following day, for about
thirty-six hours.
I mention these matters, because the reader of the narrative of the
daily work of an excursion in Switzerland will not be able to feel, at
all, as one of the travelling party, or to form any useful conception
of what he must expect, when, _in propriâ personâ_, he sets out on such
an excursion, if, throughout the narrative, the weather does not form
one thread of the yarn. It always has to be consulted, and conformed
to. It is the weather that makes the doing of what you have to do
pleasant, and even possible; or, else, unpleasant, and even impossible.
_August 19._--As it was a persistently wet day, there was nothing we
could do outside of the hotel, except visiting some of the factories
I have already referred to. It happened to be a Glarus festival, and
so those in the town proper were closed. We had, therefore, to go for
what we wanted to see to Ennenda, a manufacturing suburb of Glarus,
though quite a distinct commune, on the other side of the Linth.
Within the hotel there were people enough to talk to, and plenty
of English papers to put one abreast of what was going on at home.
At Glarus, on the east of Switzerland, you have the previous day’s
‘Times’ at 4 P.M. It is despatched from London by the morning train;
reaches Paris in time to be forwarded to Bâle, or Neuchâtel, that
night; and the next day is brought on to Glarus. During the three days
we were here, I was surprised each afternoon at having in this way
the London papers of the day before. Here, in the centre of Europe,
I was only one day, and _in extenso_, behind London. This recalled
the sensation of carrying the world about with me, which, some years
ago, I had become familiar with at New Orleans. There, every morning,
I used to find on my breakfast-table, by the side of the hot rolls,
telegraphic intelligence, from all parts of Europe, for the previous
day. It seemed to take no more time to collect this intelligence from
all parts of Europe, to send it, beneath the Atlantic, to New York,
and to forward it to New Orleans, and to set it up in type, than to
make the rolls. We look upon the rolls without an emotion of surprise,
and upon the telegraphic intelligence as a marvel. But the day was,
before the invention of wheat, when the roll would have appeared as
unintelligible, or, at all events, as impossible, as the telegraphic
intelligence. The telegraphic intelligence will some day stand in the
same relation to something not yet dreamt of, in which it is now,
itself, standing to the roll.
_August 20._--Having a letter to the President of Glarus--I take
President to be new style, and that, formerly, the title of the chief
magistrate of Glarus was Landamman--I had called at his door yesterday,
and found that he was out of town, but would return at night, and
be visible early to-day. At 8.30, therefore, this morning I again
presented myself at his door; and was admitted. I knew that at this
time a Swiss man of business--everyone here is, of course, a man of
business--would not be found still loitering over his breakfast. An
English barrister, whose acquaintance I had been so fortunate as to
make at the Glärner Hof, and who was familiar with German, had been so
good as to offer to accompany me. As the chief object of my visit was
to hear, from another Swiss authority, another account of what is meant
in these cantons by the word Corporation, I was glad of the assistance
of one whose legal training and acumen would keep the enquiry from
becoming unprofitably discursive; and who would be quick in detecting
inconsistencies and insufficiencies in the replies that might be given
to my questions. We found the President engaged with his clerk, or
secretary. He, however, immediately dismissed him with his budget of
papers, and with the utmost goodnature assured us that he was at our
disposal.
By the way, the President’s house was perhaps the best in the town. He
must, therefore, be one of the wealthiest citizens of Glarus. I found,
throughout this tour, that those officials to whom by name my letters
introduced me, were, without a single exception, in this position. I
mention this because it shows that, in the most democratic country in
Europe, wealth carries with it none of the exclusion from office with
which we sometimes hear it credited. On the contrary, it appears that
long experience in these matters, unwarped by the heat and passions
engendered by vice and destitution, has in Switzerland--at all events
in these primitive cantons, it may be otherwise in the large cities,
though I am not aware that it is--taught the dispensers of power, that
is to say the whole community, that self-respect, and the knowledge and
the leisure requisite for attention to the affairs of the public, are
more likely to be combined in a man who is pretty well off, than in one
who ought to be devoting the chief part, if not the whole, of his time
to supplying the daily wants of his family.
But to return to the President. No sooner had I told him what was my
general, and at that moment, my particular object, than he informed me
that I was engaged in an enquiry in which it would be very difficult
to reach any conclusion, except that the subject was inexplicable;
for the reason that, though the word was the same, the thing it stood
for differed in some respects in every commune. Every commune--as we
should express it, every parish--having the right to modify these
matters in accordance with its own circumstances and ideas, had availed
itself of this right; and that hence the divergencies were endless.
I told him some of the different definitions of a corporation I had
received in Uri and Unterwalden. None of these, he said, would do at
Glarus. After half an hour’s conversation we took our leave, with no
distinct impression on our minds, except that the President was very
good-natured and clear-headed, and that what he had at first told us
was quite right--that the subject was inexplicable. Confusion had
become worse confounded.
The conclusion I had been wishing to come to, on account of its
simplicity and intelligibility, was that a corporation has no direct
political object whatever; that it is a body either of old burgers,
or of Beisassen, (originally the Metoeci of the old Greek republics,)
endowed with perpetuity, and holding landed property often for some
definite object; and that it is distinct from the commune, inasmuch as
that is the political entity, which embraces all the old burgers for
economical purposes, that is for the administration, and enjoyment of
the usufruct, of the communal landed property; and which now embraces
both the old and the new burgers for legislative and administrative
purposes; with, of course, a great variety of local exceptions and
limitations in the different cantons, and in their several communes.
This, however, he told us would not be correct for Glarus; but he quite
failed in his attempt to show why it would not be correct, or what
would be correct.
On the afternoon of this day, as we happened, on our way through
Linththal to pass the house of Dr. Bekker, the minister at Linththal
of the Reformed Church, who is widely known for his publications on
the Swiss Almends, we stopped at his door, and sent in to him the
commendatory letter I had received at Berne from M. Cérésole, the
President of the Swiss Confederation. The doctor was so good as to
admit us, and allow us to confer with him for half an hour upon the
subject to which he has devoted so much attention. With respect to
the Corporation question, I found that he was disposed to accept my
conclusions, in the main; at all events, as far as the Commune of
Linththal was concerned. I might, he said, take a corporation to mean
a section of the burgers, possessed of landed property, held for a
definite object. For instance, they had at Linththal a corporation
for educational purposes possessed of four alpes, and another for the
encouragement of singing. In these there is nothing political in a
legislative or administrative sense. The object, in these cases, is
intellectual, social, philanthropic, &c.; and it is proposed to effect
the object in view by economic means, that is to say, by property
held, and used, for the purpose of furthering the object. It may, in
these secluded valleys, be in many ways a desirable thing to cultivate
singing and to maintain a body of singers. If so, then, a good object
is secured by this singing _Verein_, or corporation; and it is done,
in this fashion, at little or no cost; for the land does not maintain
one mouth or one cow the less, because those who have the usufruct
of it are obliged to further this object. The only real cost to the
individual, and, through the individual, to the community, is the time
the members of this corporation give to the object. I found at Stanz
that an Orphan Asylum had lately been endowed, in a similar fashion,
with land. The objection I, at the moment, suggested to my informant
was, that this was throwing on the existing generation, which provided
the endowment, the cost of maintaining the orphans of succeeding
generations; and that it would be better that each generation should
do its own work. Of course this remark did not dispose of the question
of the policy of this particular endowment, and still less of that
of endowments generally. It may be wise, where the community is not
rich, to place the maintenance of destitute orphans beyond the reach
of chance. So of the Linththal singing _Verein_. And as to endowments
generally, they may be useful for a particular purpose at a particular
time. Our endowments for grammar schools may have done good service
three or four centuries ago. But it does not, therefore, follow that
they are doing good service now. They may, at this day, contribute to
the maintenance of institutions, ideas, and systems unsuitable to the
wants of the day. They may hinder people from seeing what is wanted
now, and from exerting themselves to provide it. It may be so, at this
moment, with respect to our public schools, and even with respect to
our universities. The public mind may have been dazzled and misled by a
knowledge of what they did well, and usefully, in times when what they
taught was the right thing to teach. It may, furthermore, be possible
to show that, in such cases as our own public schools and universities,
the endowments which originally were intended to act, and did act,
in the direction of lessening the cost of education, now act in the
direction of increasing its cost; and that they are not so much an aid
as a hindrance to them in securing the services of the best men. But
be all this as it may, I was glad to find the doctor encouraging me in
my supposition, that in these cantons the idea of a corporation must
be kept quite distinct from that of a municipality, or of any directly
political organization.
This ‘interview’ of the doctor took place in the afternoon. It had
become possible, because at 10 A.M. the rain, that had been falling
uninterruptedly for two nights and a day, had shown some disposition
to come to an end; and we had then determined to start at once for the
chance of being able to see the upper valley of the Linth. What we
proposed was to go in a two-horse _char_ as far as it could take us,
and then to ascend to the Pantenbrücke on foot, returning to Glarus in
the evening. Our argument was the old and sound one of nothing venture,
nothing get. There was still a little rain. This might continue all
day; it might even increase. But, then, on the other hand, it might be
dying away; and, if so, then we should have time for what we wished to
do. Whereas, if we delayed another hour, to see how the weather was
going, we should not have time. Another chance in our favour was that
the rain might have become, now that it was feeble, only local, being
possibly maintained merely by the lofty mountains that stand round the
bowl in the bottom of which Glarus is situated. Our venture turned out
favourably. We had not got much more than a mile on our way, when the
rain ceased, and gave us a pleasant day. You have seventeen miles of
carriage-road up the valley. As you ascend the factories gradually thin
out; and by the time you have got to Linththal there is an end to them
altogether. You pass Stachelberg, a place now much frequented for its
mineral waters, and for the numerous excursions, on high ground, that
may be made from it. We dined at the Tödi Hotel, a small house at the
foot of the ascent to the Pantenbrücke. The way up to the Pantenbrücke
is by a good path through pine woods. These abound with, among other
ferns, the _Aspleniumviride_. The bridge is of one arch over the
Linth, here an Alpine torrent, that chafes, and dashes, and forces its
way, hoarse and tormented, along the perpendicular-sided channel it
has cut for itself, to the depth of nearly 150 feet below the bridge.
Having crossed this bridge we went on, still ascending, about three
quarters of a mile further, to the Ueli Alp. It was a strange wild
scene--high above the valley we had come from--before us, right and
left, only stupendous, sullen, mountain crags, with a glacier in front.
About these mountain-high craggy scars, and out of the dark, ruthless
chasms between them, were surging up thick masses of cloud; as it
were a vast world-storm-factory, where ministers of wrath, themselves
unseen, were forging smoking thunderbolts, and uplifting mighty
deluges, to affright, and, if need be, to shatter and to sweep away,
heedless cities on distant plains.
On our way back to Glarus we stopped at Stachelberg, and again at
Diesbach, to look, over the head of the valley, at the summit of
the mighty Tödi, the western side of which was in the light of the
declining sun. The head of the giant, crowned with unbroken snow,
was lifted above the clouds we had seen a few hours before at the
Ueli Alp. From that near point of view, they had shown themselves as
broken masses in seething, rolling motion. Now looked at from a low
and distant point of view, they had become a solid unmoving stratum,
pierced only by the head of the Tödi. At Diesbach we had also a good
near view--they were just above us--of the glaciers of the great
Glärnish: dark glaciers between darker peaks. Beneath the dark glaciers
and darker peaks, Nature’s embodiment of hardness, cold, and eternal
barrenness, came a green alpe, then a beech wood, then prairies with
hay granges, then prairies with fruit trees and _châlets_ down to the
road. Below the road potato-patches, and moister prairies along the
river side, and here and there a large factory. The glaciers above were
supplying the moving power for the factories below; and thus enabling
the owners of those factories to supply the wants of people in Italy
and the Levant; who thus, again, through an absence of the intelligence
and industry, which might have enabled them to turn their own
advantages to account, were supporting no small part of the population
of this busy Alpine valley.
We should, indeed, have been hard to please had we not been pleased
with Glarus--its strange out-of-the-world situation; its well-deserved
prosperity; its large school; the little bit of land for each
operative, and their self-respecting air. The intelligence, too, and
politeness of the proprietor of the Glärner Hof, and of his manager;
and the ready and obliging attention of the President to one whom he
had never seen before, and would never see again, told for much on
the good side. And there was nothing, but the rain, to set down on
the other side against all this. And here it would be discreditable
to omit that we had also much reason to be pleased with the man who
drove us this day, for thirty-four miles, to the head of the valley
and back again, and who to-morrow morning will drive us to Vorauen. He
was a tall, well-built, clean-limbed, active man, about forty years
of age, smooth-shaved, and tidy in his dress, ready in talk, easy
and even in manner, without a suspicion either of self-assertion or
of servility, and without any _arrière-pensée_ about francs, for his
horses and services were to be charged for, according to tariff, in
the hotel bill--_tout compris_. He had the genuine Swiss kindliness
of manner towards children, and took the little man on the box with
him, and putting the reins into his hands, gave him some lessons in
driving. He pointed out everything worthy of notice we came in sight of
during the day, and in the drive to Vorauen. He showed no impatience
at our stopping for half an hour at Dr. Beckker’s door, though it was
getting late, and he had been out all day. But, then, we must remember
that he was a burger of Glarus, as his fathers, before him, ever had
been. He had an equal voice with his neighbours in the appointment of
the magistrates, and in the management of the affairs of the little
community, that maintains a kind of high school, a college it is called
in Switzerland, for 700 children, and that assigns a bit of land to
each of its humbler members--a community, in which a man is respected
because he is a man; and in which a man thus learns to respect himself.