It is to the old burgers in any commune that these kinds of land are common. The old burgers are, with but very few exceptions, the lineal descendants of those who were burgers, say 200, it may have been 500, or even 1,000 years ago. New burgers are those, or the descendants of those, who, having come in from other cantons, or communes, settled in the place, and who have no rights of any kind in the common land. Land may be common to all the old burgers of a commune equally: it is then said to belong to the commune. Or it may belong to sections of the old burgers, as, for instance, to those who reside in a particular hamlet; or to those who belong to a particular class of families; and these may hold it either simply for their own use, or for the promotion of some defined object: in any such cases it is said to belong to a corporation.

A Swiss commune may be taken as the analogue of an English parish. The difference is that all the burgers, old and new, of a commune have now, generally—the old burgers, according to the old theory of the commune, had always had—an equal voice in the government and administration of the affairs of the commune, with the exception of the management and usufruct of the common property, which belongs, as it always has done, exclusively to the old burgers, either collectively, or sectionally. Residents from other cantons, or communes, are now pretty generally admitted more or less completely to participation in political rights. Formerly this was not the case: they were only tolerated. But with respect to the common property, whether of the commune or of its corporations, they are still rigidly excluded from all participation in it. For instance, there are alien families, that is to say, not descended from old burgers, which have been settled in Schwyz for two centuries, but which at this day have no share in the common lands. In order to bring an English rural parish into the same political condition as a Swiss commune, the humblest day-labourer ought to have, theoretically and practically, an equal voice with the squire in the election of the magistrates and officials of all kinds, and in the management of the Church funds, the schools, the roads, the water supply, the poor, &c., of the parish. To take an extreme supposition, the parochial assembly ought to be competent to enact that the parish should hire or buy so much land as would enable it to allow to each family a quarter, or half, of an acre of garden-ground, rent free. If, for the purpose of enabling us to understand the difference, we take the Swiss commune to represent, in the political order, the natural state of things, we must then regard the English rural parish as having lost a part of its rights through the usurpations of the central government, which now appoints the magistrates &c.; and as having had the majority of its inhabitants disfranchised by the usurpations of the rate-payers. Or if we regard the English rural parish as the perfection of local organization, we must say that the Swiss commune has usurped on the one side the legitimate powers of the central government, and on the other deprived the natural parochial depositaries of power, that is to say, the rate-payers, of their rightful privilege of being the exclusive administrators of everything in which the parish is concerned. The governing element in the idea of our parish appears to be the land, in that of the Swiss commune, the individual man.

The commune, then, is not far from being an independent, autonomous entity, both politically and economically. What we have now to consider is one department of its economy; that of its common lands. These, as I have already mentioned, consist of three distinct kinds; summer pastures, forests, and cultivable land. It follows from the fact of its autonomy that each commune will manage its common property very much in its own fashion; and probably there are no two communes which manage it in precisely the same fashion. But it also follows from the general similarity of their circumstances and conditions, that certain general features will pervade their management everywhere. It is with these general features that, in a notice of this kind, we are chiefly concerned. The little I shall have to say, in order to make them understood, will be founded on what I observed in the cantons I visited this summer, and in which I inquired into the system, and saw it at work. Those cantons were Unterwalden, Uri, Schwyz, and Glarus. My observations will, to some extent, be illustrated and checked by facts drawn from other quarters. For there is nothing in the world, whether in human institutions, in physiology, or in anything else, that can be understood if looked at as an isolated phenomenon. There is no such thing as an isolated phenomenon. Not even is the world itself such, any more than anything it contains. Everything is relative, concatenated, dependent; has causes, a milieu, functions, &c.; all of which so modify it, have so much to do with its being as and what it is, and throw so much light upon it, that if it is to be understood, some reference must be made to them.

We will begin with the common pastures for summering cattle—the alpes. Upon this subject the Statistical Bureau of the Federal Government published, in 1868, a quarto volume of 435 pages, to which I have already referred. It is a work of very comprehensive details, and of much interest. It exhibits completely, and analyzes thoroughly, all the information the office had, up to that date, been able to collect on the subject. I will now extract from this report such leading particulars as will give the reader a general knowledge of this part of the matter, premising the observation, which the Bureau makes, that whatever errors there may be in the figures must always, for obvious reasons, be on the side of their falling short of the truth.

The number of alpes is 4,559. Their aggregate area, in English acres, is somewhere about 2,650,000; which about equals the area of the four counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Sussex, and Kent. Their capital value, by the returns made, is 77,186,103 francs. But, as the office remarks, that probably at least a half must be added to this sum to get at the true figures, we may suppose that their aggregate capital value is, in English money, about 4,500,000l. Their letting value is returned at 3,362,642 francs. The number of cow-runs is returned as 270,389. The average number of days the alpes are fed at 93. The gross revenue at 10,893,874 francs. The net revenue at 9,545,007 francs. A fairly good cow in Switzerland, I was told, is worth twenty napoleons. We will take the good and the indifferent as averaging fifteen napoleons. This will make the value of the stock yearly put on the alpes, in English money, 3,250,000l. If then we put the capital value at 4,500,000l., and to this add the value of the stock, and for the sake of round sums, raise the net proceeds, which we may do safely, to 12,500,000 francs, we shall have 500,000l. as the net revenue on a capital of 7,750,000l. This will give a little less than 7 per cent. profits for this portion of the property of the Swiss people, for 93 days. The Bureau calculates a much higher rate of profit. I say for 93 days, because though this is all they get during the year from the alpes, the cows are earning profits for them elsewhere during the rest of the year.

To this 500,000l. of profits we must add, looking at the concern from a national point of view, the support of all those who, as cowherds and cheese-makers, or as engaged in the sale at home of the cheese, or in its transportation to foreign markets, are wholly, or in part, maintained by it. No deductions need be made from this net sum, for the cows replace themselves; and whatever is expended on the pastures has been already deducted.

We now come to the distribution of this property, and of its income. Taking

Francs
The capital value at the low and uncorrected figures of 77,186,103
The letting 3,362,642
The total gross revenue 10,893,874

and distributing these several sums according to ownership, we find the respective interests of the several owners to be as follows:—

Communes Communes and
private owners
jointly		 Corporations Private owners
Capital value. 26,226,265 3,851,48914,565,48732,542,853 } Francs
Letting value. 1,127,355 199,270 443,803 1,592,214
Gross revenue 4,010,102 624,102 1,788,224 4,471,446