The cost of maintaining the army is small, on an average $3,500,000 a year. Officers and soldiers alike receive pay only while in service. If wounded or taken ill on duty, a man in the ranks may draw up to $240 a year pension while suffering disability. Lesser sums may be drawn by the family of a soldier who loses his life in the service.
At Thoune, near Berne, is the federal military academy. It is open to any Swiss youth who can support himself while there. Not even the President of the Confederation may in time of peace propose any man for a commission who has not studied at the Thoune academy. A place as commissioned officer is not sought for as a fat office nor as a ready stepping-stone to social position. As a rule only such youths study at Thoune as are inclined to the profession of arms. Promotion is according to both merit and seniority. Officers up to the rank of major are commissioned by the cantons, the higher grades by the Confederation.
In Switzerland, then, the military leader appears only when needed, in war; he cannot for years afterward be rewarded by the presidency; pensions cannot be made perquisites of party; the army, i.e. the whole effective force of the nation, will support, and not attempt to subvert, the republic.
The True Social Contract.
The individual enters into social life in Switzerland with the constitutional guarantee that he shall be independent in all things excepting wherein he has inextricable common interests with his fellows.
Each neighborhood aims, as far as possible, to govern itself, so subdividing its functions that even in these no interference with the individual shall occur that may be avoided. Adjoining neighborhoods next form a district and as such control certain common interests. Then a greater group, of several districts, unite in the canton. Finally takes place the federation of all the cantons. At each of these necessary steps in organizing society, the avowed intention of the masses concerned is that the primary rights of the individual shall be preserved. Says the "Westminster Review": "The essential characteristic of the federal government is that each of the states which combine to form a union retains in its own hands, in its individual capacity, the management of its own affairs, while authority over matters common to all is exercised by the states in their collective and corporate capacity." And what is thus true of Confederation with respect to the independence of the canton is equally true of canton with respect to the commune, and of the commune with respect to the individual. No departure from home rule, no privileged individuals or corporations, no special legislation, no courts with powers above the people's will, no legal discriminations whatever—such their aim, and in general their successful aim, the Swiss lead all other nations in leaving to the individual his original sovereignty. Wherever this is not the fact, wherever purpose fails fulfillment, the cause lies in long-standing complications which as yet have not yielded to the newer democratic methods. On the side of official organization, one historical abuse after another has been attacked, resulting in the simple, smooth-running, necessary local and national stewardships described. On the side of economic social organization, a concomitant of the political system, the progress in Switzerland has been remarkable. As is to be seen in the following chapter, in the management of natural monopolies the democratic Swiss, beyond any other people, have attained justice, and consequently have distributed much of their increasing wealth with an approach to equity; while in the system of communal lands practiced in the Landsgemeinde cantons is found an example to land reformers throughout the world.
THE COMMON WEALTH OF SWITZERLAND.
Unless producers may exercise equal right of access to land, the first material for all production, they stand unequal before the law; and if one man, through legal privilege given to another, is deprived of any part of the product of his labor, justice does not reign. The economic question, then, under any government, relates to legal privilege—to monopoly, either of the land or its products.