On the following day (dates are no longer needed, for our excursion was now ended, and I was returning home, on my own hook) I started for Zurich by way of Berne. The country, as seen from the rails, looks as if it were fertile, and carefully cultivated. The three points in which, to the eye of a passer-by, their agriculture appears to differ most from ours are, first, the greater cleanness of the land. I know no farmers—of course there are many exceptions, and notably where there is steam-ploughing—who cultivate so many weeds as the famous British farmer. Secondly, their not giving to their land so much manure as we do. One, however, may be mistaken on this point. And, thirdly, in the absence of live stock from the fields. I understood that the price of land is very high: the figures given to me were higher than the price of equally good agricultural land would come to here at home.
Since I was last at Berne, it appeared to me that a great deal had been done in the way of extension and improvement. The place has the look of having thriven much, and of still continuing to thrive. A few years ago a neighbouring stream was diverted, and made to flow through the heart of the city. It supplies, in its new course, several copious public fountains. These are sculptured and decorated, as if the people loved the water, and wished to heighten their pleasure at seeing, and welcoming, and using it. One of the most pleasing sights in a Swiss town—it is the same down to the smallest village—is this abundance of good water with which it is supplied. It is ever in sight, for every use of man and beast. In our English cities there was no want—the omission is still far from having been set right—that was so conspicuously neglected. And this, though an abundant supply of good water is not only a first necessity of life, but equally so of civilisation. The reasons of our negligence, in a matter of so much importance, are not far to seek. As the Swiss manage their own affairs, their first care is to provide themselves with what all need; and, evidently, the first thing of this kind to be attended to is the water-supply. Their system, too, of political, and, as respects the land, to some extent, of possessive equality, has engendered a sentiment of philanthropy; not of the charitable, or condescending, kind, but a general desire in all to attend to the rights, the wants, and the well-being of all. It would be distressing to all alike to find that any one had not as much water as he could require, supplied to him in the handiest way, in which it might be possible for the opportunities, and combined resources of the community to effect this.
Different influences have been at work amongst ourselves. The community has not managed its own affairs in such a manner, and on such a footing, as that the wants and interests of the humbler, and more helpless, classes should be as much felt, and attended to, as the wants and interests of the well-to-do classes, and of those who are able to take care of themselves. This has hindered the importance, or rather the necessity, of an abundant supply of water presenting itself, generally, to men’s intelligence, and conscience, as really one of the primal cares of the community. This has not been one of the points which town councils, and rate-payers (perhaps because they were rate-payers) have seen in a proper light. There has been something which has stood in the way of their seeing it at all. Then there have been influential bodies in every community, whose interests lay in an opposite direction. I mean the water companies, and the manufacturers, and retailers of intoxicating liquors. You could hardly expect them to have seen very distinctly that it was the duty, and the interest, of the community to provide everywhere, and for everybody, a visible, constant, gratuitous supply of fresh, running, sparkling water. Nor, indeed, could the government of the country be expected to be more sharp-sighted in this matter than the local administrations; for it had to collect an enormous revenue for the purpose of enabling it to pay the interest of an enormous debt. There was, therefore, something to indispose it, also, to supply a want, the supply of which must inevitably reduce the number of millions it was collecting, every year, on the production and consumption of intoxicating drinks. These are the reasons which have issued in the fact, that water has been kept out of, or not brought into, the sight of the inhabitants of our English towns, and villages. It was not because water could be supplied on easier terms in Switzerland than in this country, because we find as much attention paid to its abundant free supply in some other continental countries, for instance in Italy, as in Switzerland.
Everyone who will give the subject a little thought will come to the conclusion, that it is this neglect which is mainly answerable for some of the preventable maladies, and for much of the drunkenness, and so of the misery and crime, which afflicts our working classes. The efforts that have been made of late years to set up drinking-fountains in London, and in many of our towns, is an indication that in this supreme matter our eyes are beginning to be opened. When they are completely opened, a public, free, inexhaustible supply of the purest possible water will be the first care of every community, great and small; and drinking-fountains will, everywhere, offer an alternative to the gin-palace and public-house, and in winter as well as in summer.
To the reflecting mind, the overflowing sparkling fountains of the Swiss towns are very pleasing objects. So, too, to the natural eye, and ear, are the brawling stream in every valley, and the trickling rills on every hill-side. There is water, water, everywhere; and every drop to drink. This the pedestrian, at all events, will appreciate; and when the sun is bright, he will be thankful for it a dozen times a day.
At Zurich I was much interested by the public collection of objects, found at the bottom of the lake, and on the site of the old lake-villages. Herodotus mentions a powerful Thracian people, who dwelt in a similarly constructed city on Lake Prasias. The Irish and Scotch cranoges are also instances of ancient structures of the same kind. To this day, in New Guinea and Borneo, and in Africa, we find water-towns still inhabited. In all these cases it was the same necessity, that of providing against sudden attacks from more powerful neighbours, that suggested the idea. And if we may refer to the same class, the lagoon-protected infancy of Venice, then the Queen of the Adriatic, with her St. Mark’s, and her palaces, owes her existence to the idea, from which originated, in a very old past, the little wooden huts of the Lake of Zurich.
The objects which have been recovered reveal the habits, arts, conditions of life, and much of the internal history of those who formed, and used them. About the events of their external history, though much of this can be pretty well imagined, of course they are silent. Nor have they anything to tell us in reply to the questions of who the people were, whence they came, or what became of them? The information they give us begins with the time when men, in central Europe, had not attained to a knowledge of metals, and were using implements of bone and stone for war, hunting, and domestic purposes. Abundance of their stone tools have been found, and also of specimens of the work done with them. For instance, some of the series of piles, upon which the dwellings were placed, and these piles are found by the hundred, we see were hacked to the point, which was to fit them for driving, with stone chisels and hatchets. And then, in other series of piles, we pass on to the era when stone had been superseded by bronze and iron tools. It is very interesting to have thus before us the actual tools, and the actual work done with them, together with ocular demonstration of the way in which, by the superiority of their work, the first metal tools superseded their perfected predecessors of stone.
Everything, one may almost say, has been preserved, and, too, in a most wonderfully perfect state. Besides the tools and weapons in great variety, there are their nets and clothes, their pottery in jars and cups, and utensils for many purposes, the bones of the animals on which they feasted, the different kinds of fruit they had gathered from the forest, and of grain they had cultivated. In all these matters the old lake-dwellers have bequeathed to us the means of comparing notes with them. The bones that have been found of the ox, the sheep, and the dog show that the varieties of the respective species then kept by the dwellers in this neighbourhood were not precisely identical with any of their varieties now known. They were, too, great hunters, and game was abundant in the locality. Among the vast quantities of bones of wild animals, that have been found, are those of the wolf, the bear, the beaver, the wild boar, the stag, the European bison (which still exists in the Forest of Lithuania, and is the largest quadruped next after the rhinoceros), and of the urus, the aboriginal wild ox of Europe, which is now extinct.
They were also agriculturists. One of the kinds of wheat they cultivated was what we call the Egyptian, or Mummy Wheat. Some of the specimens of this could not be more perfect had they been only just harvested. It had several small ears ranged round a main central ear, and from this reason sometimes goes by the name of the hen-and-chickens wheat. It is interesting to know that so distinctly marked a variety was being cultivated at so remote a period, on the banks of the Lake of Zurich, by these trans-Alpine barbarians, and on the banks of the Nile, by the subjects of the early Pharaohs, at the same time. Here is a kind of possible connection between the builders of Karnac and the builders of these pile-supported huts; and also a point in the history of one of our Cereals, of the birth, parentage, and education of all of which so little is known. Two kinds of millet, and a six-rowed variety of barley have also been found. These rude contributories to the ancestry of the modern European were at the same time collecting for food, from the neighbouring forests, sloes, bullaces, wild cherries, beech-mast, crab-apples, elder-berries, the hips of the wild rose, raspberries, blackberries, and hazel-nuts; for well-preserved remains of all these have been found on the sites of the lake-villages. Some of the specimens are supposed to show slight differences from the same fruits now growing wild in the neighbourhood. These differences, if they do really exist, must, notwithstanding their slightness, indicate a long lapse of time.