In the mean time the people in our pension, who were so intelligent and well informed about other things, bore witness to the real security of the State, and the tranquillity of the Swiss mind generally concerning politics, by their ignorance of the name of their existing President. They believed he was a man of the name of Schultz; but it appeared that his name was not at all Schultz, when we referred the matter to our pasteur. It was from him, indeed, that I learned nearly all I knew of Swiss politics, and it was from his teaching that I became a conservative partisan in the question, then before the voters, of a national free-school law. The radicals, who, the pasteur said, wished Switzerland to attempt the role "grande nation," had brought forward this measure in the Federal legislature, and it was now, according to the sensible Swiss custom, to be submitted to a popular vote. It provided for the establishment of a national bureau of education, and the conservatives protested against it as the entering wedge of centralization in government affairs. They contended that in a country shared by three races and two religions education should be left as much as possible to the several cantons, which in the Swiss constitution are equivalent to our States. I am happy to say that the proposed law was overwhelmingly defeated; I am happy because I liked the pasteur so much, though when I remember the sympathetic bric-à-brac dealer at Vevay, who was a radical, but who sold me some old pewters at a very low price, I can't help feeling a little sorry too. However, the Swiss still keep their old school law, under which each canton taxes itself for education, as our States do, though all share in the advantages of the universities, which are part of the public-school system.
The parties in Switzerland are fortunately not divided by questions of race or religion, but the pasteur owned that the Catholics were a difficult element, and had to be carefully managed. They include the whole population of the Italian cantons, and part of the French and German. In Geneva and other large towns the labor question troublesomely enters, and the radicals, like our Democrats, are sometimes the retrograde party.
The pasteur spoke with smiling slight of the Père Hyacinthe and the Döllinger movements, and he confessed that the Protestants were cut up into too many sects to make progress among the Catholic populations. The Catholics often keep their children out of the public schools, as they do with us, but these have to undergo the State examinations, to which all the children, whether taught at home or in private schools, must submit. He deplored the want of moral instruction in the public schools, but he laughed at the attempts in France to instil non-religious moral principles: when I afterwards saw this done in the Florentine ragged schools I could not feel that he was altogether right. He was a member of the communal school committee, and he told me that this body was appointed by the syndic and council of each commune, who are elected by the people. To some degree religion influences local feeling, the Protestant Church being divided into orthodox and liberal factions; there is a large Unitarian party besides, and agnosticism is a qualifying element of religious thought.
Outside of our pension I had not many sources of information concerning the political or social life at Villeneuve. I knew the village shoemaker, a German, who had fixed his dwelling there because it was so bequem, and who had some vague aspirations towards Chicago, whither a citizen of Villeneuve had lately gone. But he was discouraged by my representation, with his wax, his awl, and his hammer, successively arranged as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, on his shoe-bench, of the extreme distance of the last from the seaboard. He liked his neighbors and their political system; and so did the portier at the Hôtel Byron, another German, with whom I sometimes talked of general topics in transacting small affairs of carriage hire and the like, and who invited me to notice how perfectly well these singular Swiss, in the midst of a Europe elsewhere overrun with royalties, got on without a king, queen, or anything of the kind. In his country, he said, those hills would be covered with fortifications, but here they seemed not to be thought necessary.
