POLITICAL POSITION OF THE SWISS REPUBLIC” 

London, May 1, 1853 

Royal families formerly used to employ whipping-boys, who had 
the honor of receiving condign punishment on their profane 
backs, whenever any of the scions of royalty had committed an 
offense against the rules of good behavior. The modern European 
political system continues this practice, in a certain degree, in the 
erection of small intermediate States, which have to act the 
scapegoat in any domestic squabble by which the harmony of the 
“balance of power” may be troubled. And in order to enable these 
smaller States to perform this enviable part with suitable dignity, 
they are, by the common consent of Europe “in Congress 
assembled,” ’* and with all due solemnity, declared “neutral.”” Such 
a scapegoat, or whipping-boy, is Greece—such is Belgium and 
Switzerland. The only difference is this—that these modern 
pohtical scapegoats, from the abnormal conditions of their 
existence, are seldom quite undeserving of the inflictions they are 
favored with. 

The most conspicuous of this class of States has of late been 
Switzerland, 

Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur—* 

the Swiss. And wherever the people of any European State came 
into collision with their rulers, the Swiss were equally sure to come 
in for their share of the trouble; until since the beginning of this 
year, Switzerland, after having made itself gratuitously contempti- 

a Q. Horatii Flacci, Epistolarum, Liber Primus, Epistola II, Ad Lollium; the line 
ends with “Achivi’’— Achaeans.— Fd. 

Political Position of the Swiss Republic 87 

ble to the revolutionary party, has been placed in a sort of 
interdict by the rulers of Continental Europe. Squabbles about 
refugees with the Emperor Bonaparte, for whose sake Switzerland 
once came very near risking a war; squabbles with Prussia on 
account of Neuchatel; squabbles with Austria about Tessinese and 
the Milan insurrection’; squabbles with the minor German States 
about subjests which nobody cares for; squabbles on all hands, 
threatening notes, expulsions, passport chicanes, blockades, rain- 
ing down upon poor Switzerland thick as hailstones in a storm, 
and yet, such is human nature, the Swiss are happy, contented and 
proud in their own way, and feel more at home in this shower of 
abuse and insult, than if the political horizon was cloudless and 
bright. 

This honorable political position of Switzerland is, by the popular 
mind of Europe, rather vaguely and clumsily expressed in the 
common saying: Switzerland has been invented by the rulers of 
Europe in order to bring republican governments into contempt; 
and certainly, a Metternich or Guizot may have often said: If 
Switzerland did not exist, we should have to create it. To them, a 
neighbor like Switzerland, was a real god-send. 

We cannot be expected to repeat the multifarious charges 
brought of late, against Switzerland and Swiss institutions, by real 
or would be revolutionists. Long before the movements of 1848, 
the organs of the revolutionary Communist party of Germany 
analyzed that subject, they showed why Switzerland, as an 
independent State, must ever be lagging behind in the march of 
European progress, and why that country, with all its republican 
shows, will ever be reactionary at heart.* They were even violently 
attacked, at that time, by divers democratic spouters and manufac- 
turers of clandestine declamation, who celebrated Switzerland as 
their “model-republic,” until the model institutions were once tried 
upon themselves. The subject is now as trite as can be; nobody 
disputes the fact, and a few words will suffice to put the matter in its 
true light. 

The mass of the Swiss population follow either pastoral or 
agricultural pursuits; pastoral,in the high mountains, agricultural 
wherever the nature of the ground admits of it. The pastoral 
tribes, for tribes you may call them, rank among the least civilized 
populations of Europe. If they do not cut off heads and ears like 
the Turks and Montenegrins, they perform acts of hardly less 

Deutsche-Briisseler-Zeitung, November 1847 (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 367- 
74).— Ed. 

barbarity by their judicial assemblies; and what cruelty and beastly 
ferocity they are capable of, the Swiss mercenaries at Naples and 
elsewhere have proved.” The agricultural population is quite as 
stationary as the pastoral; they have nothing in common with the 
agricultural population of the American Far West, whose very 
aliment is change, and who clear every twelvemonth an amount of 
land far larger than all Switzerland. The Swiss peasant tills the 
patch of ground his father and grandfather tilled before him; he 
tills it in the same slovenly way as they did; he earns about as 
much as they did; he lives about as they did, and consequently he 
thinks very nearly in the same way as they did. Had it not been 
for feudal burdens and imposts levied upon them, partly by 
aristocratic families, partly by patrician corporations in the towns, 
the Swiss peasantry would always have been quite as stationary in 
their political existence as their neighbors, the cowherds, are up to 
the present day. The third components of the Swiss people, the 
industrial population, although necessarily far more advanced in 
civilization than the two classes mentioned before, yet live under 
circumstances which exclude them in a great degree from the 
progressive giant impulse which the modern manufacturing 
system has imparted to Western Europe. Steam is hardly known in 
Switzerland; large factories exist in a few localities only; the 
cheapness of labor, the sparseness of the population, the 
abundance of small mountain-streams fit for mills; all these and 
many other circumstances tend to produce a petty and sporadic 
sort of manufactures mixed up with agricultural pursuits, the most 
eligible industrial system for Switzerland. Thus watch-making, 
ribbon-weaving, straw-plaiting, embroidery, &c. are carried on in 
several cantons, without ever creating or even increasing a town; 
and Geneva and Basle, the richest, and with Zurich, the most 
industrial towns, have hardly increased for centuries. If, then, 
Switzerland carries on her manufacturing production almost 
exclusively upon the system in practice all over Europe before the 
invention of steam, how can we expect to find other than 
corresponding ideas in the minds of the producers; if steam has 
not revolutionized Swiss production and intercommunication, how 
could it overthrow the hereditary ways of thinking? 

The Hungarian Constitution bears a certain resemblance to that 
of Great Britain, which circumstance has been turned to good 
account by Magyar politicians, who thence would make us jump to 
the conclusion that the Hungarian nation is almost as advanced as 
the English; and yet there are many hundreds of miles and of 
years between the petty tradesman of Buda and the Cotton lord of 

Political Position of the Swiss Republic 89 

Lancashire, or between the traveling tinker of the Puszta* and the 
Chartist working-man of a British manufacturing metropolis. 
Thus, Switzerland would give itself the airs of a United States on a 
smaller scale; but barring the superficial resemblance of political 
institutions, no two countries are more unlike than ever-moving, 
ever-changing America, with a historical mission whose immensity 
people on both sides of the Atlantic are but just beginning to 
divine, and stationary Switzerland, whose never-ending petty 
distractions would result in the perpetual round-about motion 
within the narrowest circle, were she not in spite of herself 
dragged forward by the industrial advance of her neighbors. 

Whoever doubts this, will be satisfied after a perusal of the 
history of Swiss railways. Were it not for the traffic from south to 
north moving round Switzerland on both sides, not a railroad 
would ever have been constructed in that country. As it is, they 
are made twenty years too late. 

The French invasion of 1798, and the French revolution of 
1830, gave occasion to the peasantry to throw off their feudal 
burdens; to the manufacturing and trading population to throw 
off the mediaeval yoke of patrician and corporative control. With 
this progress the revolution of Cantonal Government was com- 
pleted. The more advanced cantons had obtained constitutions to 
suit their interests. This Cantonal revolution reacted upon the 
Central Representation Assembly and Executive. The party 
vanquished in the individual cantons was here strong; the struggle 
was fought over again. The general political movement of 
1840-47, which everywhere in Europe brought about preliminary 
conflicts, or prepared decisive collisions, was in all second- and 
third-rate States—thanks to the jealousies of the great powers— 
favorable to the opposition, which may be described as the 
middle-class party. It was the case, too, in Switzerland; the moral 
support of Britain, the indecision of Guizot, the difficulties which 
kept Metternich at bay in Italy, carried the Swiss over the 
Sonderbund war”; the party which had been victorious in the 
liberal cantons in 1830, now conquered the Central Powers. The 
revolutions of 1848 made it possible for the Swiss to reform their 
feudal constitutions in accordance with the new political organiza- 
tion of the majority of the cantons’*; and now we may say that 
Switzerland has attained the highest political development of 
which she, as an independent State, is capable. That the new 

federal constitution is quite adequate to the wants of the country, 
the constant reforms in the monetary system, the means of 
communication, and other legislative matters affecting the industry 
of the country, abundantly show; but, alas! these reforms are of a 
nature that any other State would be ashamed of, on account of the 
mass of traditionary nuisances, and the antediluvian state of society, 
the existence of which, up to that date, they disclose. 

What, at most, can be said in favor of the Swiss Constitution 1848 is 
this: that by its enactment the more civilized portion of the Swiss 
declared themselves willing to pass, to a certain extent, from the 
Middle Ages into modern society. Whether, however, they will at 
any time be able to do away with privileged trades’ corporations, 
guilds, and such-like mediaeval amenities, must remain very 
doubtful to any one who has the least knowledge of the country, 
and who has seen in a single instance the strenuous efforts with 
which respectable “vested interests” oppose even the most 
matter-of-course reform. 

Thus we see the Swiss, true to their character, moving on 
quietly in their own restricted domestic circle while the year 1848 
uprooted all the stability of the European Continent around them. 
The revolutions of Paris, of Vienna, of Berlin, of Milan, were by 
them reduced to as many levers of Cantonal intrigue. The 
European earthquake had even for the radical Swiss no other 
interest but this—that.it might vex some conservative neighbor by 
upsetting his crockery. In the struggle for Italian independence 
Sardinia solicited an alliance with Switzerland, and there is no 
doubt that an addition to the Sardinian army of 20 or 30,000 
Swiss would have very soon driven the Austrians out of Italy. 
When 15,000 Swiss in Naples were fighting against Italian liberty 
it certainly might be expected that Switzerland, in order to 
maintain her boasted “neutrality,” should send an equal number to 
fight for the Italians; but the alliance was rejected and the cause of 
Italian independence was lost as much through Swiss as through 
Austrian bayonets. Then came the disasters of the revolutionary 
party, and the wholesale emigration from Italy, from France, from 
Germany, to the neutral Swiss soil. But there neutrality ceased; Swiss 
radicalism was satisfied with what it had achieved, and the very 
insurgents, who, by holding in check the tutors and natural superiors 
of Switzerland, the absolutist governments of the Continent, had 
enabled the Swiss to carry out their internal reform undisturbed — 
these very insurgents were now treated in Switzerland with every 
possible insult and turned out of the country at the first bidding of 
their persecutors. Then began that series of degradation and insult 

Political Position of the Swiss Republic 91 

which one neighboring government after another heaped upon 
Switzerland, and which would make the blood of every Swiss boil if 
Swiss nationality had any foundation and Swiss independence any 
existence other than in boast or fame. 

Never has such treatment been offered to any people as the 
Swiss have been made to submit to by France, Austria, Prussia, 
and the minor German States. Never were demands half as 
humiliating made upon any country, without being resented by a 
struggle for life or death. The surrounding Governments, by their 
agents, presumed to exercise the office of Police upon the Swiss 
territory; they exercised it not only over the refugees, but over the 
Swiss Police officers also. They laid complaints against subaltern 
agents, and demanded their dismissal; they even went so far as to 
hint at the necessity of changes in the Constitutions of several 
cantons. As for the Swiss Government, to every bolder demand, it 
gave an humbler reply; and whenever its words breathed a spirit 
of opposition, its acts were sure to make up for it by increased 
subserviency. Insult after insult was pocketed, command after 
command was executed, until Switzerland was brought down to 
the lowest level of European contempt,—till she was more 
despised than even her two “neutral” rivals, Belgium and Greece. 
And now, when the demands of her chief assailant, Austria, have 
reached that hight of impudence which even a statesman of the 
temper of M.Druey could hardly swallow, without some show of 
resistance—now, in her most recent, most spirited notes to 
Vienna, she shows how far she is reduced. 

The champions of Italian independence,—men who, far from 
showing any wicked Socialist or Communist tendencies, would, 
perhaps, not even go to the length of wishing for Italy the same 
Constitution as that under which Switzerland lives,;—men who 
have and make no claim to the demagogical celebrity even of 
Mazzini, are there treated as assassins, incendiaries, brigands, and 
upsetters of all social order. As to Mazzini, the language is of 
course far stronger; and yet everybody knows that Mazzini, with 
all his conspiracies and insurrections, is as much a supporter of 
social order, as at present constituted, as M. Druey himself. Thus, 
the result of the whole exchange of notes is, that, in principle, the 
Swiss give in to the Austrians. How, then, is it to be expected they 
will not give in in practise? 

The fact is this: Any bold and persistent Government can get 
from the Swiss what it likes. The isolated life which the mass of 
them lead, deprives them of all sense of their common interest as 
a nation. That a village, or a valley, or a canton should stick 

together is no wonder. But, to stick together as a Nation for a 
common purpose, be what it may, they never will. In all invasions, 
as soon as the danger becomes serious, as in 1798, one Swiss has 
betrayed the other, one canton abandoned the next. The 
Austrians have expelled 18,000 Tessinese from Lombardy, without 
any cause. The Swiss make a great outcry about it and collect 
money for their unfortunate confederates. Now, let Austria hold 
out, and continue to prohibit the return of these Tessinese, and in 
a very short time you will see a wonderful change in Swiss 
opinion. They will get tired of collecting money, they will say that 
the Tessinese always meddled in Italian politics and deserved no 
better; in fact they are no true Swiss confederates (Keine guten 
Eidgenossen). Then the expelled Tessinese will settle in the other 
cantons of Switzerland and “turn the natives out of employment.” 
For in Switzerland a man is not a Swiss, but a native of such and 
such a canton. And when that comes to pass then you will see our 
brave confederates muster up their indignation, then you will see 
intrigues of all sorts directed against the victims of Austrian 
despotism, then you will see the Tessinese Swiss as much hated, 
persecuted, calumniated as the foreign refugees were during their 
time in Switzerland, and then Austria will obtain everything she 
wants and a great deal more if she takes the trouble to ask for it. 

When the nations of Europe have recovered their faculty of free 
and normal action they will take into consideration what is to be 
done with these petty “neutral” States, which while subservient to 
counter-revolution when it is ascendant, are neutral and even 
hostile to every revolutionary movement and yet pass themselves 
off as free and independent Nations. But, perhaps, by that time, 
not a trace will be left of these excrescences of an unsound body.