By the way, the President’s house was perhaps the best in the town. He must, therefore, be one of the wealthiest citizens of Glarus. I found, throughout this tour, that those officials to whom by name my letters introduced me, were, without a single exception, in this position. I mention this because it shows that, in the most democratic country in Europe, wealth carries with it none of the exclusion from office with which we sometimes hear it credited. On the contrary, it appears that long experience in these matters, unwarped by the heat and passions engendered by vice and destitution, has in Switzerland—at all events in these primitive cantons, it may be otherwise in the large cities, though I am not aware that it is—taught the dispensers of power, that is to say the whole community, that self-respect, and the knowledge and the leisure requisite for attention to the affairs of the public, are more likely to be combined in a man who is pretty well off, than in one who ought to be devoting the chief part, if not the whole, of his time to supplying the daily wants of his family.
But to return to the President. No sooner had I told him what was my general, and at that moment, my particular object, than he informed me that I was engaged in an enquiry in which it would be very difficult to reach any conclusion, except that the subject was inexplicable; for the reason that, though the word was the same, the thing it stood for differed in some respects in every commune. Every commune—as we should express it, every parish—having the right to modify these matters in accordance with its own circumstances and ideas, had availed itself of this right; and that hence the divergencies were endless. I told him some of the different definitions of a corporation I had received in Uri and Unterwalden. None of these, he said, would do at Glarus. After half an hour’s conversation we took our leave, with no distinct impression on our minds, except that the President was very good-natured and clear-headed, and that what he had at first told us was quite right—that the subject was inexplicable. Confusion had become worse confounded.
The conclusion I had been wishing to come to, on account of its simplicity and intelligibility, was that a corporation has no direct political object whatever; that it is a body either of old burgers, or of Beisassen, (originally the Metoeci of the old Greek republics,) endowed with perpetuity, and holding landed property often for some definite object; and that it is distinct from the commune, inasmuch as that is the political entity, which embraces all the old burgers for economical purposes, that is for the administration, and enjoyment of the usufruct, of the communal landed property; and which now embraces both the old and the new burgers for legislative and administrative purposes; with, of course, a great variety of local exceptions and limitations in the different cantons, and in their several communes. This, however, he told us would not be correct for Glarus; but he quite failed in his attempt to show why it would not be correct, or what would be correct.
On the afternoon of this day, as we happened, on our way through Linththal to pass the house of Dr. Bekker, the minister at Linththal of the Reformed Church, who is widely known for his publications on the Swiss Almends, we stopped at his door, and sent in to him the commendatory letter I had received at Berne from M. Cérésole, the President of the Swiss Confederation. The doctor was so good as to admit us, and allow us to confer with him for half an hour upon the subject to which he has devoted so much attention. With respect to the Corporation question, I found that he was disposed to accept my conclusions, in the main; at all events, as far as the Commune of Linththal was concerned. I might, he said, take a corporation to mean a section of the burgers, possessed of landed property, held for a definite object. For instance, they had at Linththal a corporation for educational purposes possessed of four alpes, and another for the encouragement of singing. In these there is nothing political in a legislative or administrative sense. The object, in these cases, is intellectual, social, philanthropic, &c.; and it is proposed to effect the object in view by economic means, that is to say, by property held, and used, for the purpose of furthering the object. It may, in these secluded valleys, be in many ways a desirable thing to cultivate singing and to maintain a body of singers. If so, then, a good object is secured by this singing Verein, or corporation; and it is done, in this fashion, at little or no cost; for the land does not maintain one mouth or one cow the less, because those who have the usufruct of it are obliged to further this object. The only real cost to the individual, and, through the individual, to the community, is the time the members of this corporation give to the object. I found at Stanz that an Orphan Asylum had lately been endowed, in a similar fashion, with land. The objection I, at the moment, suggested to my informant was, that this was throwing on the existing generation, which provided the endowment, the cost of maintaining the orphans of succeeding generations; and that it would be better that each generation should do its own work. Of course this remark did not dispose of the question of the policy of this particular endowment, and still less of that of endowments generally. It may be wise, where the community is not rich, to place the maintenance of destitute orphans beyond the reach of chance. So of the Linththal singing Verein. And as to endowments generally, they may be useful for a particular purpose at a particular time. Our endowments for grammar schools may have done good service three or four centuries ago. But it does not, therefore, follow that they are doing good service now. They may, at this day, contribute to the maintenance of institutions, ideas, and systems unsuitable to the wants of the day. They may hinder people from seeing what is wanted now, and from exerting themselves to provide it. It may be so, at this moment, with respect to our public schools, and even with respect to our universities. The public mind may have been dazzled and misled by a knowledge of what they did well, and usefully, in times when what they taught was the right thing to teach. It may, furthermore, be possible to show that, in such cases as our own public schools and universities, the endowments which originally were intended to act, and did act, in the direction of lessening the cost of education, now act in the direction of increasing its cost; and that they are not so much an aid as a hindrance to them in securing the services of the best men. But be all this as it may, I was glad to find the doctor encouraging me in my supposition, that in these cantons the idea of a corporation must be kept quite distinct from that of a municipality, or of any directly political organization.
This ‘interview’ of the doctor took place in the afternoon. It had become possible, because at 10 A.M. the rain, that had been falling uninterruptedly for two nights and a day, had shown some disposition to come to an end; and we had then determined to start at once for the chance of being able to see the upper valley of the Linth. What we proposed was to go in a two-horse char as far as it could take us, and then to ascend to the Pantenbrücke on foot, returning to Glarus in the evening. Our argument was the old and sound one of nothing venture, nothing get. There was still a little rain. This might continue all day; it might even increase. But, then, on the other hand, it might be dying away; and, if so, then we should have time for what we wished to do. Whereas, if we delayed another hour, to see how the weather was going, we should not have time. Another chance in our favour was that the rain might have become, now that it was feeble, only local, being possibly maintained merely by the lofty mountains that stand round the bowl in the bottom of which Glarus is situated. Our venture turned out favourably. We had not got much more than a mile on our way, when the rain ceased, and gave us a pleasant day. You have seventeen miles of carriage-road up the valley. As you ascend the factories gradually thin out; and by the time you have got to Linththal there is an end to them altogether. You pass Stachelberg, a place now much frequented for its mineral waters, and for the numerous excursions, on high ground, that may be made from it. We dined at the Tödi Hotel, a small house at the foot of the ascent to the Pantenbrücke. The way up to the Pantenbrücke is by a good path through pine woods. These abound with, among other ferns, the Aspleniumviride. The bridge is of one arch over the Linth, here an Alpine torrent, that chafes, and dashes, and forces its way, hoarse and tormented, along the perpendicular-sided channel it has cut for itself, to the depth of nearly 150 feet below the bridge. Having crossed this bridge we went on, still ascending, about three quarters of a mile further, to the Ueli Alp. It was a strange wild scene—high above the valley we had come from—before us, right and left, only stupendous, sullen, mountain crags, with a glacier in front. About these mountain-high craggy scars, and out of the dark, ruthless chasms between them, were surging up thick masses of cloud; as it were a vast world-storm-factory, where ministers of wrath, themselves unseen, were forging smoking thunderbolts, and uplifting mighty deluges, to affright, and, if need be, to shatter and to sweep away, heedless cities on distant plains.
On our way back to Glarus we stopped at Stachelberg, and again at Diesbach, to look, over the head of the valley, at the summit of the mighty Tödi, the western side of which was in the light of the declining sun. The head of the giant, crowned with unbroken snow, was lifted above the clouds we had seen a few hours before at the Ueli Alp. From that near point of view, they had shown themselves as broken masses in seething, rolling motion. Now looked at from a low and distant point of view, they had become a solid unmoving stratum, pierced only by the head of the Tödi. At Diesbach we had also a good near view—they were just above us—of the glaciers of the great Glärnish: dark glaciers between darker peaks. Beneath the dark glaciers and darker peaks, Nature’s embodiment of hardness, cold, and eternal barrenness, came a green alpe, then a beech wood, then prairies with hay granges, then prairies with fruit trees and châlets down to the road. Below the road potato-patches, and moister prairies along the river side, and here and there a large factory. The glaciers above were supplying the moving power for the factories below; and thus enabling the owners of those factories to supply the wants of people in Italy and the Levant; who thus, again, through an absence of the intelligence and industry, which might have enabled them to turn their own advantages to account, were supporting no small part of the population of this busy Alpine valley.
We should, indeed, have been hard to please had we not been pleased with Glarus—its strange out-of-the-world situation; its well-deserved prosperity; its large school; the little bit of land for each operative, and their self-respecting air. The intelligence, too, and politeness of the proprietor of the Glärner Hof, and of his manager; and the ready and obliging attention of the President to one whom he had never seen before, and would never see again, told for much on the good side. And there was nothing, but the rain, to set down on the other side against all this. And here it would be discreditable to omit that we had also much reason to be pleased with the man who drove us this day, for thirty-four miles, to the head of the valley and back again, and who to-morrow morning will drive us to Vorauen. He was a tall, well-built, clean-limbed, active man, about forty years of age, smooth-shaved, and tidy in his dress, ready in talk, easy and even in manner, without a suspicion either of self-assertion or of servility, and without any arrière-pensée about francs, for his horses and services were to be charged for, according to tariff, in the hotel bill—tout compris. He had the genuine Swiss kindliness of manner towards children, and took the little man on the box with him, and putting the reins into his hands, gave him some lessons in driving. He pointed out everything worthy of notice we came in sight of during the day, and in the drive to Vorauen. He showed no impatience at our stopping for half an hour at Dr. Beckker’s door, though it was getting late, and he had been out all day. But, then, we must remember that he was a burger of Glarus, as his fathers, before him, ever had been. He had an equal voice with his neighbours in the appointment of the magistrates, and in the management of the affairs of the little community, that maintains a kind of high school, a college it is called in Switzerland, for 700 children, and that assigns a bit of land to each of its humbler members—a community, in which a man is respected because he is a man; and in which a man thus learns to respect himself.
CHAPTER XI.
THE KLÖNTHAL—VORAUEN—RICHISAU—THE PRAGEL—MUOTTA—BRUNNEN—THE RIGI KULM.
Ever charming, ever new,