CHAPTER XVII. SWITZERLAND, 1424.
That little dot on the map of Europe, situated among the Alps, called Switzerland, has always formed an attractive and pleasing object to lovers of freedom and equality. Surrounded by powerful neighbors, the mountaineers of these little cantons seem to have imbibed, with the purer air of heaven in which they live on the mountains, that degree of stern courage, determination, and love of liberty which enables them to resist the pressure of the great nations by which they are surrounded. Switzerland, like the wedge of steel, tempered by the spirit of republicanism, has formed one point of pressure which the monarchies around her have been unable to resist. The love of liberty with which the Swiss are endowed, and their hatred of “caste,” are best typified by “The Gray Leaguers” and their story:
In the green valleys of Eastern Switzerland, on almost every hill that juts out from the gray mountain walls of the Alps and commands the fertile fields and villages of the upper Rhineland, there stands a ruined castle. And in that castle, in the early Middle Ages, there dwelt some little local princeling who lorded it with almost unquestioned power over the peasantry around him.
These feudal nobles had held sway, with no right save that founded on might, for generations, before the subject peasants, weak, scattered, and resourceless, were at last driven by the intolerable arrogance of this dominant “caste” to combine for mutual defence. Some of the leaders of the movement met in the little hillside chapel of St. Anna, still standing near the town of Truns, in March, 1424, and took solemn oaths to respect their own and all the people’s rights, and to wage war upon those who would not respect them.
Johann Caldar—a name revered in his district as is that of William Tell in the scenes of his legendary exploits—gave the signal for the first attack on the oppressors. Caldar dwelt in the upper Rhine valley, not far from the baronial castle of Fardun. The Lord of Fardun entered the peasant’s cottage one day at noontide, and in wanton token of contempt spat into the soup that was boiling for the midday. Caldar seized him, and crying, “Eat the soup thou hast seasoned!” thrust his head into the pot, and held it thus until he was choked. Then he went forth to bear over mountain and valley the banner of a revolt that forever annihilated the nobles’ tyranny and left their strongholds in ruins.
For three centuries and a half the Gray Leaguers, as the victorious peasants called themselves, met every tenth year in the chapel of St. Anna, where their first oaths had been taken, and renewed the pledge of popular liberty. At length their territory became the fifteenth canton of the Swiss Republic, still retaining, as it does to-day, its old name—the Grisons, as it is in French.
The American traveling in Europe may view with delight scenes upon the beautiful Rhine; his artistic eye may be delighted by the art treasures of Italy; memories made dear to him may be recalled as he visits England; but in Switzerland he seems to fill his lungs with kindred and familiar air. This little oasis in the desert of monarchies, surrounded by worshippers at the temple of “caste,” is to the American an Alabama, “Here we rest.”
Until the overthrow of the Third Napoleon and the establishment of a republic in France, nowhere else in Europe did the American feel himself so much at home as in Switzerland; and to those rugged mountaineers of the Alps is due the credit of keeping alive the spirit of liberty almost submerged beneath the flood of monarchical ideas which inundated Europe. Every republic on earth, and each republican, should feel indebted to little Switzerland that the fire of freedom was not entirely extinguished.