Chapter V
The best general history of Switzerland available in English is Mr. E. Salisbury's translation (1899) of the Short History of Prof. Dändliker. It has little merit as literature, but is abreast of critical research at all points. For the Reformation period, the older history of Vieusseux (Library of Useful Knowledge, 1840) is fuller and better, though now superseded as to early times. The work of Sir F.O. Adams and C.D. Cunningham on The Swiss Confederation, 1880 (translated and added to in French by M. Loumyer, 1890), is an excellent conspectus, especially for contemporary Swiss institutions. As regards the first half of the last century, Grote's Seven Letters concerning the Politics of Switzerland (1847, rep. 1876) are most illuminating.
Of fuller histories there are several in French and German. The longer Geschichte der Schweiz of Prof. Dändliker (1884-87) is good and instructive, though somewhat commonplace in its thinking. Dierauer's Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (1887), which stops before the Reformation period, is excellent so far as it goes, and gives abundant references, which Dändliker's does not; though his Short History gives good bibliographies.
Zschokke's compendious Des Schweizerlands Geschichte (9te Aufgabe, 1853) is lucid and very readable, but is quite uncritical as to the medieval period. That is critically and decisively dealt with in Rilliet's Les Origines de la Confédération Suisse, 1868, and in Dierauer.
In more than one respect, the political evolution of Switzerland is the most interesting in the whole historic field. The physical basis, the determinations set up by it, the reactions, the gradual control of bias, the creation of stability out of centrifugal forces—all go to form the completest of all political cases.[871] Happier than those of Greece, if less renowned, the little clans of Switzerland have passed through the storms of outer and inner strife to a state of something like assured republican federation. And where old Greece and Renaissance Italy and Scandinavia have failed to attain to this even on the basis of a common language and "race," the Swiss Cantons have attained it in despite of a maximum diversity of speech and stock. As does Japan for Asia, they disprove for Europe a whole code of false generalisations.
The primary fact in the case, as in that of Greece, is the physical basis. Like Hellas, the Swiss land is "born divided"; and the first question that forces itself is as to how the Cantons, while retaining their home rule, have contrived to escape utterly ruinous inter-tribal strife, and to attain federal union. The answer, it speedily appears, begins with noting the fact that Swiss federation is a growth or aggregation, as it were, from a primary "cell-form." From the early confederation of the three Forest Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, and Unterwalden, a set of specially congruous units, led to alliance by their original isolation from the rest of Helvetia and their common intercourse through the Lake of Lucerne, came the example and norm for the whole. The primary influence of mere land-division is proved by the persistence of the cantonal spirit and methods to this day;[872] but the history of Switzerland is the history of the social union gradually forced on the Cantons by varying pressures from outside. That it is due to no quality of "race" is sufficiently proved by the fact that three or four languages, and more stocks, are represented in the Republic at this moment.
In the union of the Forest Cantons, as in the rooting of several Swiss cities and the cultivation of remote valleys, the Church has been held to have played a constructive part. At the outset, according to some historians,[873] Schwytz and Uri and Unterwalden had but one church among them; hence a habit of congregation. But the actual records yield no evidence for this view, any more than for the other early dicta as to the racial distinctness of the people of the Forest Cantons, and their immemorial freedom. Broadly speaking, the early Swiss were for the most part serfs with customary rights. The first documentary trace of them is in the grant by Louis of Germany to the convent at Zurich, in the year 853, of his pagellus Uroniae, with its churches, houses, serfs, lands, and revenues.[874] This did not constitute the whole of the Canton; but it seems clear that the bulk of the population were in status serfs, though when attached to a royal convent they would have such privileges as would induce even freemen to accept the same state of dependence.[875] In the Canton of Schwytz, again, the people—there in larger part freemen—seem to have been always more or less at strife with the great monastery of Einsiedeln, founded about 946 by Kaiser Otto, and largely filled by men of aristocratic birth seeking a quiet life,[876] who held by the usual interests of their class as well as their corporation.[877] It was a question of ownership of pastures, the main economic basis in that region; and the descendants of the early settlers were fighting for their subsistence. Unterwalden, finally (then known only as the higher and lower valleys, Stanz or Stannes and Sarnen or Sarnon), was led in its development by Uri and Schwytz, each of which possessed some communal property, the former in respect of its beginnings as a royal domain, the latter in respect of the association of its freemen.