The rural industries of Switzerland are fostered with great care. In particular the forests, which protect the soil from being swept away and are ramparts to the villages against avalanches, are jealously preserved. No one may cut down a tree, even his own tree, in Switzerland without the authority of a forestry official. The Department of Forestry supervises carefully the wooded lands and marks those trees which can be felled without harm to the wood.
The organisation of the national services, posts, roads, railways, etc., is also shaped to secure the greatest degree of comfort possible for the small land-holders. It is a wise policy. These rustic people, living almost exclusively on their own resources, eating food which they have produced, wearing clothes which they have spun, demanding so little from the outside world, are the very backbone of the Swiss nation, and they are the rock-foundations of the national patriotism. The Swiss are not bound together by the ties of a common race, a common language, a common religion. Their nation is in a sense an artificial one. Its cementing bond is an hereditary instinct, nourished among the peasants of these mountain pastures, to keep the mountain slopes free.
The town life of the Swiss, affected a good deal as it must be by the hotel life of the tourists, is not so admirable as the village life. It is in some aspects irritatingly petty-minded; in others invitingly well-educated. The Swiss are interested only in the Swiss, and (in a strictly commercial way) the strangers who come to visit and enrich Switzerland. A Swiss newspaper tells little or nothing of the doings of the outside world. Its columns are filled with long accounts of the doings of Swiss shooting clubs and gymnastic societies. Yet Swiss trading and professional people are, in the general rule, astonishingly well versed in foreign languages and foreign literature. Offering asylum as it does to political and social rebels of all countries, Switzerland is a kind of international clearing-house for thought. The Gallic, the Teutonic, the Slavonic new thought of the day—all are understood and discussed in Switzerland, and the Swiss book-shops are the most cosmopolitan and representative in the world.
The use of national costume dwindles in Switzerland as it does in every other part of the world. The peasant women have, however, still a characteristic head-dress, the maidens wearing black caps, the matrons white ones. The caps are two slips of upright lace, which, coming from behind over the head, meet on the forehead, the whole having the air of a butterfly with wings half outspread. Between these, the girls' tresses are puffed and held back by a silver pin—called a Rosenadel, from its head resembling a rosebud. The matrons only vary this mode in covering their hair with an embroidered piece of silk. For the festivals attending the movement of the cattle to the hills, the hay-cutting, and the vintage, the peasants also don gay national costume.
Traces of the old sumptuary laws of the Calvinist communities still linger in the habits of the people, and show, too, in the absence of pomp at public ceremonies or representative meetings. A Communal Assembly looks like a class-room. The universities carry on their work with a sober absence of pomp, and uniforms are rare. The great amusement of the people in many quarters is still religious disputation and invective. The most popular place in all Geneva for the Swiss inhabitants is the Victoria Hall, where "revivalist" preachers of the most damnatory forms of religion hold forth.
HAY HAULING ON THE ALPINE SNOW.