One morning, a week before the vintage began, we were wakened by the
musical clash of cow-bells, and for days afterwards the herds came
streaming from the chalets on all the mountains round to feed upon the
lowland pastures for a brief season before the winter should house them.
There was something charming to ear and eye in this autumnal descent of
the kine, and we were sorry when it ended. They thronged the village in
their passage to the levels beside the Rhone, where afterwards they lent
their music and their picturesqueness to the meadows. With each herd
there were two or three goats, and these goats thought they were cows;
but, after all, the public interest of this descent of the cows was not
really comparable to that of the fall elections, now coming on with
handbills and newspaper appeals very like those of our own country at
like times. In the cafés, the steamboats, the railway stations, the
street corners, vivid posters warned the voters against the wiles of the
enemy, and the journals urged the people of the Canton Vaud to be up and
doing; they declared the issue before them a vital one, and the crisis a
crisis of the greatest moment.
[Illustration: _Castle of Aigle_]
In the mean time the people in our pension, who were so intelligent and
well informed about other things, bore witness to the real security of
the State, and the tranquillity of the Swiss mind generally concerning
politics, by their ignorance of the name of their existing President.
They believed he was a man of the name of Schultz; but it appeared that
his name was not at all Schultz, when we referred the matter to our
pasteur. It was from him, indeed, that I learned nearly all I knew of
Swiss politics, and it was from his teaching that I became a
conservative partisan in the question, then before the voters, of a
national free-school law. The radicals, who, the pasteur said, wished
Switzerland to attempt the role "_grande nation_," had brought forward
this measure in the Federal legislature, and it was now, according to
the sensible Swiss custom, to be submitted to a popular vote. It
provided for the establishment of a national bureau of education, and
the conservatives protested against it as the entering wedge of
centralization in government affairs. They contended that in a country
shared by three races and two religions education should be left as much
as possible to the several cantons, which in the Swiss constitution are
equivalent to our States. I am happy to say that the proposed law was
overwhelmingly defeated; I am happy because I liked the pasteur so much,
though when I remember the sympathetic bric-à-brac dealer at Vevay, who
was a radical, but who sold me some old pewters at a very low price, I
can't help feeling a little sorry too. However, the Swiss still keep
their old school law, under which each canton taxes itself for
education, as our States do, though all share in the advantages of the
universities, which are part of the public-school system.
The parties in Switzerland are fortunately not divided by questions of
race or religion, but the pasteur owned that the Catholics were a
difficult element, and had to be carefully managed. They include the
whole population of the Italian cantons, and part of the French and
German. In Geneva and other large towns the labor question troublesomely
enters, and the radicals, like our Democrats, are sometimes the
retrograde party.
The pasteur spoke with smiling slight of the Père Hyacinthe and the
Döllinger movements, and he confessed that the Protestants were cut up
into too many sects to make progress among the Catholic populations. The
Catholics often keep their children out of the public schools, as they
do with us, but these have to undergo the State examinations, to which
all the children, whether taught at home or in private schools, must
submit. He deplored the want of moral instruction in the public schools,
but he laughed at the attempts in France to instil non-religious moral
principles: when I afterwards saw this done in the Florentine ragged
schools I could not feel that he was altogether right. He was a member
of the communal school committee, and he told me that this body was
appointed by the syndic and council of each commune, who are elected by
the people. To some degree religion influences local feeling, the
Protestant Church being divided into orthodox and liberal factions;
there is a large Unitarian party besides, and agnosticism is a
qualifying element of religious thought.
Outside of our pension I had not many sources of information concerning
the political or social life at Villeneuve. I knew the village
shoemaker, a German, who had fixed his dwelling there because it was so
_bequem_, and who had some vague aspirations towards Chicago, whither a
citizen of Villeneuve had lately gone. But he was discouraged by my
representation, with his wax, his awl, and his hammer, successively
arranged as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, on his shoe-bench, of the
extreme distance of the last from the seaboard. He liked his neighbors
and their political system; and so did the _portier_ at the Hôtel Byron,
another German, with whom I sometimes talked of general topics in
transacting small affairs of carriage hire and the like, and who invited
me to notice how perfectly well these singular Swiss, in the midst of a
Europe elsewhere overrun with royalties, got on without a king, queen,
or anything of the kind. In his country, he said, those hills would be
covered with fortifications, but here they seemed not to be thought
necessary.
[Illustration: _The Market at Vevey_]
I made friends with the _instituteur_ of the Villeneuve public school,
who led the singing at church, and kept the village book-store; and he
too talked politics with me, and told me that all elections were held on
Sunday, when the people were at leisure, for otherwise they would not
take the time to vote. He was not so clear as to why they were always
held in church, but that is the fact; and sometimes the sacred character
of the place is not enough to suppress boisterous party feeling, though
it certainly helps to control it.
After divine service on election Sunday I went to the Croix Blanche for
my coffee, to pass the time till the voting should begin. On the church
door was posted a printed summons to the electors, and on the café
billiard tables I found ballots of the different parties scattered.
Gendarmes had also distributed them about in the church pews; they were
enclosed in envelops, which were voted sealed. On a table before the
pulpit the ballot-box--a glass urn--was placed; and beside it sat the
judges of election, with lists of the registered voters. But in any
precinct of the canton an elector who could prove that he had not voted
at home might deposit his ballot in any other. The church bell rang for
the people to assemble, and the voting began and ended in perfect quiet.
But I could not witness an election of this ancient republic, where
Freedom was so many centuries old, without strong emotion; it had from
its nature and the place the consecration of a religious rite.