The government of Lucerne, which with Solothurn and Fribourg formed the remaining pure Swiss aristocracies, consisted of a little council of six-and-thirty members, which, reinforced by sixty-four others, held the sovereign authority. With regard to intellectual cultivation, the most contradictory features were observable at Lucerne. On the one hand, learning, enlightenment, and patriotism were hereditary distinctions of some families; while, on the other hand, the mass was imbued with ignorant fanaticism. On the one hand, the encroachments of the papacy were resisted with inflexible firmness; while, on the other hand, the clergy kept possession of a highly mischievous influence in the state. On the one hand, a series of saints’ days and holidays was abolished, as being dedicated to dissoluteness more than devotion; while, on the other hand, we are horror-struck by the burning of a so-called heretic. In 1747, a court, consisting of four clergymen, sentenced Jacob Schmidli, a man of blameless life, to be strangled, and then burned with his books and writings, because he had not only read the Bible for his private edification, but had explained and recommended it to others as the sole true basis of religion. His wife, his six children, and seventy-one other persons were banished, his house was burned to the ground by the hands of the public executioner, and a monument raised on its former site, to perpetuate the ignomy (query: of the victim or of his judges?).
The appearance of two pamphlets in 1769, on the question “whether removal or restriction of the monastic orders might not be found beneficial to the Catholic cantons?” excited terrible uproar at Lucerne, where certain classes were constantly scenting danger to church or state from some quarter. The town and county clergy, and the bigots in the council, were rejoiced to get so good an opportunity to persecute the holders of free principles, and raised a deplorable howl, as if the canton were on the verge of destruction. The whole population was plunged in consternation and astonishment, by thundering sermons and rigorous prohibitions of the obnoxious work. Free-thinkers were fulminated against by name from the pulpits; and Schinznach, which had witnessed the formation of the Helvetic society, was denounced as the focus and headquarters of heresy.
This society, which aimed at the diffusion of useful knowledge, public spirit, and union throughout the Helvetic body, without reference to varieties of religion, rank, or political system, was founded by a knot of patriotic and instructed men, in the pious hope of arresting the decline of the confederation. At its commencement it consisted of no more than nine members, but added to its numbers with astonishing rapidity. The society was soon viewed with an evil eye by the cantonal governments, which dreaded all independence of feeling and action in the people. At Bern, political dangers were anticipated from it, as symptoms of refractoriness were exhibited shortly after its formation by the nobles in the Vaud; while at Lucerne it was regarded as a conspiracy for shaking off the Catholic religion, and assisting the supposed ambition of Bern to gain ascendency over the whole confederation.
The aristo-democratical governments next come under our notice, and in these, as in most of the purely aristocratical, the metropolis had obtained unlimited power over the whole canton. In these, however, particular families did not engross the sovereign power; the collective body of citizens had maintained themselves by means of the regulations of their guilds in the possession of considerable influence over the public affairs. Accordingly the magistracy favoured the monopolies which enriched the metropolitan traders, and imposed restraints on the industry and invention of the surrounding country. Thence the subjects of these towns were much more harshly administered than those of the aristocratical cantons. Their ancient charters fell into oblivion, and were withdrawn as far as possible from public inspection; they were not only excluded from civil and military, but even from ecclesiastical functions; and the exercise of many branches of industry, and the sale of their productions in the towns, was wholly cut off by corporation privileges. Moreover, since the commencement of the century of which we are treating, no mode of acquiring the rights of burghers remained open; they were only conferred on extremely rare occasions to reward eminent merit; or when the times became troublesome to conciliate influential burghers. Hence that discontent and disaffection which broke out at the close of the century found a principal focus in the heart of the mixed aristocracies.
In the larger cantons the public administration was for the most part incorrupt; and that of justice was liable on the whole to fewer complaints than in many other European countries. The pay of public servants, with few exceptions, was extremely moderate. Men who had devoted their whole lives to public affairs, and who had filled the highest offices in the state, lost more than they gained by the bounty of their country. At Zurich, the expenses of the government were wholly defrayed without the imposition of taxes, properly so called, from the revenues and interests of the national lands and capital, from ground-rents, tithes, the salt monopoly, and the produce of the premium paid by the several guilds of traders in return for their exclusive privileges. The same description is applicable to the government of Bern, excepting that here the course of justice was tedious and expensive. The superior financial resources of the latter canton enabled her to execute more for public ends than Zurich. Bern invested considerable sums in foreign securities, particularly in the English funds; and, besides, amassed a treasure amounting to some millions of dollars, which became, as we shall presently see, and as Mably had predicted, the booty of rapacious and powerful neighbours.
Very different was the condition of the free or common bailiwicks, particularly those of the democratical cantons; here most of the land-vogts sought by every species of extortion to indemnify themselves for the sums for which they had in fact bought their places from the general assemblies of their respective cantons. Many made an open traffic of justice; took presents from both parties; helped delinquents to evade deserved punishment who could pay for exemption, and exacted contributions from the wealthier class whenever and wherever they could. Even farther than in the German domains of Switzerland were abuses of this kind carried in the Italian bailiwicks, and most of all in those of the Grisons. The inevitable tendency of such treatment was to debase the popular character in those districts, and its effects have left unequivocal traces even to this day.
In those towns of which the constitution was grounded on corporate bodies, the privileges of the burghers and their guilds received progressive extensions. Propositions were made which would hardly have been conceivable in monarchical states, and could only, in fact, take place where particular classes had to decide upon the destiny of the rest of their fellow-countrymen. In Bâle it was several times proposed, under the pretext of protection to agriculture, that the exercise of certain manufactures should be prohibited altogether in the rural part of the canton.[c]
FEDERAL RELATIONS OF THE SWISS STATES
The federal bond which united the various cantons and their allies was very loose, and far different from that which fastened together the united provinces of Holland, or even from the federal compact of the United States of North America. There was not in Switzerland any permanent sovereign body, no standing federal magistrate equally acknowledged by all, no central government having its own establishment, its own treasury, its own servants, civil and military. The general diets could not decide upon any important question, unless it had been previously debated and decided on in the councils of each of the cantons, who were applied to by their own deputies for fresh instructions at every new case which was brought before the diet. The cantons were not even each allied to all. The eight older cantons had among them a federal compact for their common defence, and even of these eight the five first only, viz. Zurich, Schwyz, Uri, Unterwalden, and Lucerne, were bound to enter into no other alliance without each other’s consent; while the other three, Glarus, Zug, and Bern, were at liberty to form alliances with other states or foreign princes, provided such alliances contained nothing prejudicial to the federal bond. The eight cantons were also bound, by the convention of Stanz, to assist one another in supporting the form of government established in each of them.
The five junior cantons, viz. Fribourg, Solothurn, Bâle, Schaffhausen, and Appenzell, had no federal bond with the whole of the rest, nor among themselves, but every one of them was allied to some one or more of the others. The three forest cantons alone were allied to every one of the other cantons. By these means, however, the guarantee of common defence was secured to each; for, as any canton attacked had the right of calling some other cantons to its assistance, and as these were entitled to call others, all would be brought in to take a part, in virtue of their particular bonds.