Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

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.