Thusis commences a few steps beyond the bridge of the Nolla. The first house on the right side of the long street of which it is composed is the chief hotel of the place. We walked up to the door, and stood on the step. A four-horse carriage was about to start for the Splügen, and the landlord was impressively reiterating his adieux, and his wishes for a pleasant journey, to its occupants. For two or three minutes I waited, but as he did not think it worth his while to salute with a word the coming guest, or to beg to be excused for a moment, that he might pile up still higher his good wishes for his departing guests, I asked the circumnavigator to resume his burden, and went on to the hotel de la Poste, at the further end of the opposite side of the long street. Mine host that might have been now saw that, though it was well done to speed the guest parting with four horses, it was ill done not to welcome also the guest arriving on foot. But in this case the coming guest hardened his heart, and no place was given for repentance. The hotel de la Poste had its advantages. It was not yet 12 o’clock, and as my companion had been limping for the last hour, I saw that I should be obliged to sleep at Thusis; and when you have nothing to do, it is something to have even the arrivals and departures of the diligences to look at. Some of those who come, or who are waiting to go, by them will perhaps have something to say; at all events you see something of what manner of people they are. And then the telegraph bureau is at hand, and you can, which it is always pleasing to do, in a few moments ask your travelling friends what they are about, and tell them where you are. This is very different from, and far better than, writing and receiving letters. It is so near an approach to direct, actual conversation. Letters belong to quite a different category. By the time a letter is received all your plans, or those of your friends, may have been altered. You may be going in an opposite direction to that announced. Your feelings may have become the reverse of those described. Regrets, or rejoicings, may have been called into being on grounds that never came to have any existence. But telegrams, which tell friends where they respectively are, and how they are, at the moment, are present indubitable realities.
Being then obliged to remain at Thusis for the rest of the day, I went in the afternoon to see the old castle of Hohen Rhätien. The ruins of one of these mediæval strongholds cannot, generally, be regarded with much interest, because gratitude is no ingredient in the feelings which the sight of it awakens. The stage of history to which they belong was rather a painful interruption, than a satisfactory continuance, of the progress of human affairs. Its units, represented by these castles, were small fragments of rude force; and these were but ill-compacted into rude wholes, that hardly deserved the name of states. The strong owners of these castles were prompted by a consciousness of their strength to lives of violence and oppression, and the weak were obliged to attach themselves to the strong, only to be oppressed. The physical ruled the moral and intellectual without disguise and without mitigation, except so far as it was counteracted by what soon became the moral and intellectual tyranny of the Church. Of the evils of this system we even suppose that we have not yet reached the end, but that we are still in some degree suffering from them. For reasons of this kind we are indisposed to see in it, what history tells us we ought, the first step in the new order of things to which we belong, and which we may hope has grander possibilities for us than the preceding order of things in the old world had for those of its day; or, indeed, to see in it anything but an assertion of force and injustice, which for a long period altogether forbad, and the consequences of which may be still somewhat hindering, the advance of society in the direction of fair and reasonable institutions. It is with very different feelings that we contemplate the monuments of Greece and Rome, and even of old Egypt; for they do not, as these do, remind us of mere individual brute force. They were works of organized societies, whose wants were of a more human and cultured kind, and whose mistakes and misdeeds, as their consequences are now no longer felt, are almost lost to memory. At all events we owe them much. The very ruins of their buildings remind us of one part of the debt. But we cannot, or will not, feel in this way towards the owners of these old castles. In passing, therefore, the remains of one of them many of us have no wish to inspect it. It is not sacred ground to us. What pleases us most in the matter is the fact, visible in passing it, that it is in ruins.
For such reasons as these, while a little before midday I had looked up at the ruins of the old castle of Hohen Rhätien, I had not thought them worth the hour or so that would have been required for going up to see them; but now in the afternoon, having nothing else to do, I inspected them with some attention. To get to them I had to recross the two bridges. I then, about 200 yards beyond that over the Hinter Rhein, crossed a small mill-race running parallel to the road, and went straight up a steep timber-slide, which is visible from the road. At the head of this you come on the regular horse-track, from Sils to the castle. Three or four hundred yards of this bring you to a steep turfy slope, where you may desert the horse path which winds round the summit to the top, and in five minutes you will be on the top among the ruins. They consist of several detached buildings. The first is a square tower with thick walls. It has no door, or constructed entrance, in the walls that now remain, the only access to the interior being by a hole in one of the angles. We may, therefore, suppose that this was an advanced outwork, that was entered either by a subterranean gallery which connected it with the castle some hundred yards off, or by a ladder which was applied to some aperture in an upper story which has now disappeared from the walls. It may also have been useful as a storehouse for provisions of some kind or other. Next to this is a structure, which evidently was a small church. It is in good preservation. The tower still stands. Alongside of the tower is a chamber with a groined ceiling, which may, possibly, have been the chancel. In line with, so as to be a continuation of, this chamber is the nave of the church. The two windows that alone lighted it are very narrow; but, then, in this part of the world windows are made as small as possible, for to admit a sufficiency of light would, for the greater part of the year, be to admit an intolerable quantity of cold.
Close to the church, in the direction of the castle, is a building about twenty feet square. The walls are about three feet thick. Their stones in some courses are laid horizontally, in others in a slanting, or herringbone, position. Close to this is another building similarly constructed, but more dilapidated. This is not quite so wide as it is long. It has remains of a floor above the ground floor.
Just beyond these two last mentioned buildings is the true castle. It is of very solid construction, but of no great extent. I paced it, but do not remember its exact dimensions. My impression is that it is not so much as a square of forty feet. Neither the door, nor windows, were arched. The latter are in the form of embrasures, much recessed, of course to admit to the interior as much light as possible through such small openings, and to enable its defenders to command as much space as possible outside. The lowest of these embrasures is at a considerable height from the ground. Half the basement is occupied by a spacious excavation in the living rock, which doubtless was the cellar. This is the first necessity in every dwelling place in this part of Switzerland, where the winters are so severe, and some days in summer very hot. If the cellar of a house does not prove good, that is to say, if it should prove incapable of keeping wine, cheese, milk, beer, meat, and in these days potatoes, from the cold of winter and the heat of summer, the house itself is of little value. This large rock-cellar doubtless answered well the purpose for which it was designed. I pictured it to myself stored with hogsheads of wine, barrels of flour, salt beef and bacon, and tiers of cheese, against the annually recurrent siege of winter, or an expected summer siege from the lord of some neighbouring castle. There was plenty of everything, for those were days when rapid digestion waited upon vigorous appetite, and eating and drinking were the great business of life. There were three stories. The large stone fire-place of the first of these remains. Its chimney is carried up, and against, the inner wall, almost as if it had been an after-thought. Does the existence of this chimney throw any light on the date of the structure? We can hardly suppose such a chimney of earlier date than the fourteenth century, but as it appears to have been applied to the wall, and not constructed in it, the wall may be of much greater age than the chimney. There are no traces of chimneys elsewhere in the building. A court-yard surrounded the castle. This included at the angle, between the two precipitous faces of the extremity of the mountain, a space that might have been a garden, or a yard for the live stock in troublous times. It is now laid down in grass for mowing. The castle itself did not stand upon the edge of the precipice. Between it and the precipice, indeed on the very edge of it, are the remains of some small buildings. These, as probably did the three other buildings first mentioned, must have supplied the stabling for horses and cattle, and storehouses for provisions and hay in ordinary times. The church could not have been intended for more than thirty or forty people. This, and the small dimensions of the castle itself, furnish us with some data for forming an estimate of the wealth and power of its original builder, and of his successors. One cannot suppose that his retainers comprised more than about a dozen families. And perhaps the same may be said of the retainers of those who possessed the dozen other castles of the immediate neighbourhood. In descending I took the regular old road down to Sils, for I wished to go the way the old feudal chief and his retainers had used. To one either going to, or coming from Thusis, this way is quite a mile longer than the timber slide.
These may, as we are told they are, be the remains of the oldest castle in Switzerland; but their situation, as well as their character, demonstrate that the explanation given of the name is erroneous. Livy tells us that, at the time of the settlement of the Gauls in northern Italy, the Etruscans they displaced moved off to, and took possession of the district of which the Grisons of our day form a part. In classical times it was called Rhætia, to explain which name, a leader of the emigration of the name of Rhætus was invented. This tradition is supposed to be supported by the assumptions that the name of Thusis is derived from Tuscia, and that the name by which this old castle is now known has come down from the times of Rhætus, its presumed original founder. The tradition, however, affirms an improbability. No invaders, settling themselves among a dispossessed and hostile population, would have constructed so small a fortress, which could have given shelter to only a very small garrison. Nor would they have placed it in such a situation: for there being then no road below Thusis, it would have been at the bottom of a cul de sac, and any one who could have held and devastated the valley, would have starved out the little garrison of the castle. We may, therefore, pretty safely conclude that it belongs to the same date as the church, that is to say, to the times, when feudal lords, who under the conditions of the period implied castles, were a necessity. The great number there was of them at that time in the valley was a kind of common insurance to each against some of the risks to which they would otherwise have been exposed.
We read a good deal in Swiss histories of the way in which in many places the peasants rose against their feudal lords, expelled or killed them, and dismantled or burnt their castles. At all events there was once an abundance of these lords, and we cannot suppose that they voluntarily abandoned their strongholds, and their lands. We see the ruins of a great many of these strongholds, and we see the peasants now in possession of the lands which once supported these strongholds. This, if like things are to be called by like names, is neither more nor less than what French, German, Italian, and Spanish Internationalists are aiming at. Here, in these valleys, as far as the land is concerned, their scheme has for many generations been thoroughly carried out. Lands which feudal lords once held peasants now hold. The substitution of one proprietary for the other was in many cases brought about by the direct use of physical force, in others by the peaceable, it might have been, expression of the will of the community, backed, however, by physical force: which comes to precisely the same thing. And now this peasant proprietorship has had several centuries to develop its nature completely, without any retarding, or disturbing causes operating against it. Whatever merits, therefore, and whatever demerits the system may have, may be seen here, for no one would assert that it can be without either the one, or the other. Some estimate of each I endeavoured to make in my first ‘Month in Switzerland’ of two years back; and in my second ‘Month’ of last year, I endeavoured to direct attention to the history, and to the present action, in this age of capital, of the Allmends, or commonable lands of Switzerland, which in the days anterior to accumulations of capital were, in Switzerland at all events, a necessary appendage to peasant proprietorship. All that I now wish to remark is that that portion of the land which is held as private property, has for a long time been divided into such small holdings, and from absence of settlements, trusts, and charges, has been so completely at the disposal of existing proprietors, as would probably satisfy the most extreme Internationalist, who was in favour of permitting any private rights at all in the land.
In human affairs, however, nothing continues long in one stay; and their progress has at length given rise in these valleys to a new and enlarged development of one of the instruments of production, which formerly existed in them only in the germ, but is now seen to have greater capabilities than have hitherto been found in the land itself: at all events it is one to which the uses of, and the property in, land must now accommodate themselves. This disturbing element, this instrument of production, the powers of which have of late been so much enlarged, is capital in money. And neither the Internationalist, nor anybody else who interests himself about the mixed questions of economics and politics, can arrive at any safe or workable conclusions, unless he so far understands its uses, action, and power, as to see that without it society would collapse, and revert to barbarism. We may, perhaps, get a little glimpse into the question of what are its uses, action, and power, if we divide the inhabitants of these thriving valleys into those who are supported by capital in money, and those who are supported by capital in land, and then endeavour to see how each class is living. I propose the division in the above form, because I suppose that ultimately, and in the nature of things, there is no scientific ground for the assumption, implied in popular usage, of there being a fundamental difference, when they are regarded as means of production, between land and money, or even between either of these two and labour. They are all I imagine, in a broad and true generalization, capital. They seem to be all means of production, and so only different forms of capital. Still the division proposed is one with which we are familiar, and which is intelligible, at least to the eye. To proceed, then, with it: it is clear that a man, and one, too, who was the son of a peasant, can now live here, and live better, than any of the peasant proprietors have for generations lived, without owning, or occupying, a klafter of land. Many are doing this. Every year a greater number do it. What is required for doing it is thought, knowledge, the power of seeing far, and of combining divers facts and considerations, energy, perseverance, and character. It is to be done not so much by the hands as by the brain. That is the chief human instrument to be used. The field to be cultivated is not a little piece of land for supplying directly a man’s own wants, but his efforts must aim primarily at the supply of the wants of others, in a sense of the world. This, however, is only possible through the existence and the use of capital in money. For this purpose money has two distinct functions. First it is the common measure not only of all the useful and exchangeable productions of the world and of man, but also of all that contributes to their production, whether the human means as labour, skill, and knowledge, or the material means as the land and the requisite tools, implements, and machinery: in short, it renders both the human and the material means of production, and the commodities produced, all commensurable. In the second place it enables us, practically, to store up surplus produce of any kind in such a form as to be reconvertible at will into produce of any kind, or into the means of production. In these ways it correlates all the wants and all the capabilities of the whole family of man, dispersed over the world, putting each country into reciprocal relations with all the others. It enables each to produce whatever it may have any natural capacity for producing, and to exchange it for whatever it may want. And this it does not only between different nations, but also between the different individuals of the same nation, and of the same neighbourhood. This is a field, the cultivation of some part of which generally yields to its cultivator a far greater return than can by any amount of individual labour be extracted from two or three acres with some appurtenant rights of fuel and pasturage. And now if we turn to those who are living on the hard-won produce of their few acres, we see that their lives, too, have been greatly elevated and embellished by the existence and applications of capital in money. It might be shown that to it they were indebted for their education, and for the opportunities they have had for starting their children in the world. It has given them the means of travelling very cheaply at the rate of twenty miles an hour; it has given them the means of communicating with the world by the post and by the telegraph; it has brought to their door opportunities for earning something from the travellers that visit their neighbourhood; to it they owe their newspaper; it, too, has enabled them to procure coffee, sugar, wine, cheap clothing, and many other minor advantages. Annihilate capital, and every man throughout these valleys, and throughout the world, is debarred from access to the products of the world, and reduced to the miserable life that is limited to what he can produce with his own hands. Increase capital, which means ultimately, and in its largest sense, the store of useful commodities the whole world may be made to yield, and the human and material means requisite for production, and for distribution, and then there is opened to every man the possibility of entering by his own labour, or skill, or knowledge, up to the amount of their productiveness, into the possession of everything he needs, that any part of the world is capable of supplying. The way to enter on their possession is at all events opened to him, and the command over them to which he may attain will depend mainly upon himself, that is to say, upon the way in which he was brought up, and what he was taught. Whether he is ever to rise to the possession and management of any portion of the money capital of the world will depend almost entirely on how he was brought up, and what he was taught. When all this shall be seen more distinctly than it now is by some of us, the Internationalist, who is himself a creation of money capital, will not perhaps have so much to say as he has at present about the tyranny of capital.
But to go back to our Swiss valleys. It is clear that there has issued from the peasantry, who till recently were their only inhabitants, a class of men who are living a higher life than the peasants, that is than the landed proprietors. It is the life of those who accumulate capital in money, and who live upon the employment of it. And this capital in money is, under the circumstances of the country, within the reach of every one to far higher amounts in value than is the land, the old form of capital. What is needed for its acquisition is cultivated intelligence, and certain moral qualities. This is precisely the point to which the attention and the efforts of the Internationalists should be directed. If society takes care, and it is endeavouring to do this in Switzerland, to give to all its members as fair a chance as is possible under existing circumstances to attain to this culture of the intelligence, and to these moral qualities, the majority will more or less avail themselves of the opportunities offered to them; and so, having numbers, wealth, intelligence, justice, and moral character on their side, will be too strong to be disturbed by the residuum. The son of an Upper Engadin peasant, who had gone out into the world like most of his countrymen, there learnt German and French, and made some money, and now, having returned home with what he had made, was turning it to good account, remarked to me, ‘Our education is improving, but already we have enough of it to enable those, who are disposed to avail themselves of it, to get on in the world. The rest are brutish, and must live by brute work.’ For a moment I was shocked at the hardness of the statement: but I made no reply, for I saw that it was no more than the action of the inexorable law of natural selection applied to moral and intellectual life. It would not be a law were it not inexorable. The analogy, too, of nature requires that it should be applied to man as well as to the lower animals and to plants; and, indeed, if exemptions from it were admissible in any part of the general scheme, they would be admissible least of all in the case of man, for it is of more importance to guard against deterioration that which is highest and best, if we may so speak of any part of the general scheme, than that which is of inferior value—at all events than that which to us appears to occupy a lower place in the scale of being.