MR. HEPWORTH DIXON ON THE SWISS.* 'ruts book has the
usual merit of Mr. Hepworth Dixon's works, and it has also the usual defects. Few men are quicker to see
that a subject is intrinsically interesting, few more certain to mar the interest by faults of treatment. The Swiss are a people whose country is very familiarly known, especially to Englishmen, and whose institutions, character, political and social ideas are, partly for that very reason, almost unknown. Travellers in Switzerland see the mountains and lakes perfectly, because an artificial popu- lation has grown up to meet their requirements, and it never occurs to the average tourist that hotel-keepers, and guides, and car-drivers do not constitute the whole nation. The ordinary estimate of the Swiss is based on cursory and not very impartial observation of those classes, who are in no sense representative, not more so than the Piedmontese organ-boys in England would be of the Italian people. There was ample room for a good book about the Swiss, and for seeing this Mr. Hep- worth Dixon deserves credit ; but it cannot be said that he has treated the subject well or adequately. Something may be learned even from his flippant pages, and that especially on two or three topics which are at present of vital importance, and likely to furnish materials for bitter political conflict in this country, as to the experience of a kindred Teutonic nation respect- ing local self-government, universal education, and universal military service. But all the rest of the book is worse than worth- less, consisting in about equal parts of vague talk, penny-a-lining descriptions, and raw lumps of statistical information. A very large part of the non-statistical portion is east in the form of • TheBwitzers. By William Hepworth Dixon. London: Hurst ft Blacken. 1871 dialogue, the author choosing to put his remarks into the months of various more or less imaginary persons ; and it is curious to observe that they all discourse in the same stilted fashion. A Savoyard nun, a Bernese engineer, the Rector of Einsiedeln, a school teacher at Geneva, all talk that singular form of English which is a compound of the styles of Mr. Rus- kin and the Daily Telegraph, and which perhaps deserves to be ranked as a separate variety, under the title of Dixonese. And as if this were not a sufficient injury, they are• further credited with a fair proportion of Mr. Dixon's blunders, which are both numerous and varied enough to suggest astonish- ing depths of ignorance. We knew Mr. Dixon was no historian, and were not surprised at his vaguely calling all non-German Swit- zerland Celtic, or at his never having discovered the peculiar rela- tion in which the Cantons Berne and Uri, for instance, stood to con- quered territories outside the old Confederation, or at his ap- parently having no idea that the Graubiinden have a history. We did not expect from him an appreciative account of the Landes- genzebule of Uri, which was described by a real historian some time ago in the pages of a contemporary, and which requires some historical knowledge and insight to comprehend it : but still we hardly looked for such a tissue of absurdities as the following passage :— " The mountain people stand aloof from what is new and strange, while those who live on plains and by the sea, are apt to change their laws and creeds from year to year. The hill tribes of Judea kept their covenant, while the bribes of Jordan and Eadraelon fell away. Those Modes who never changed a law, descended from the Caspian alps ; those Greeks who sought new things from day to day were dwellers by the ./Egean Sea.—' You think the sea has much to do with man's desire for change ? ' It is the cause. A. man who looks on water grows like water, and a man who looks on nips grows like an alp."
We did not suppose Mr. Hepworth Dixon to be a scholar and a linguist, but we did not expect to find misspellings of proper +names which involve mistakes of French grammar, or that a writer who is so careful to give the German names of the Swiss towns (Bern, Zurich, Luzern, Basel, &c.) should not have advanced far enough in that language to know that biinden is plural. We could forgive ignorance of Swiss geography, in consideration of the author having turned his special attention to Swiss men, though it is hard to swallow snow-fields on the Rigi ; but he might, at any rate, have taken the trouble to ascertain that what he professes to see is not physically impossible.
Criticism, however, like punishment, is almost useless as a means of reforming hardened offenders. This is by no means Mr. Hepworth Dixon's first work ; we fear it will not be his last, and 'we despair of any improvement. A man who has written so many books and is still totally indifferent to his own ignorance is not likely to go to school now. We prefer to abandon the endless task of exposing blunders and absurdities, and to devote the remainder of our space to two important and closely connected topics to which we have already referred, premising that these portions of the work before us are at any rate less bad than the remainder. The Swiss, if we may trust Mr. Hepworth Dixon's report of what the school teachers themselves say, have solved already the problem of how to work universal compulsory educa- tion, or rather the problem has solved itself in Switzerland in the fashion which the advocates of compulsion have always predicted. Compulsion has become no longer neces- sary; not only do parents send their children to school as a matter of course, and regard the temporary exclusion from school as a severe penalty for misconduct, but the children are of the same mind. Nor is this result attained by turning work into play, and amusing the children during a large portion of so-called school hours, after a manner by no means unknown among ourselves. The amount of work exacted seems to be very heavy, far heavier than any English school would in general impose on boys of the same age (we limit our remarks to the education of boys, because in England the education of girls, with some conspicuous excep- tions, is so shamefully below any reasonable standard that no use- ful comparison can be made with Switzerland, where boys and girls are taught alike). But the labours are under- taken cheerfully, and regarded not as irksome tasks, to be shirked for the sake of the attractions of play, but as their natural and pleasurable occupations. Where this is the case, the familiar proverb about all work and no play loses half its force ; and certainly the average Swiss peasant, though he comes of a stolid race, has a very reasonable amount of brightness about him, besides retaining in manhood a fair proportion of the general information instilled into him at school. A Bernese guide can tell snore about the laws and social institutions of his country and canton than an average Englishman of any rank knows about England. Moreover, the schools afford the means of making the Army reasonably efficient on the minimum of strictly military training. The elements of drill begin from a very early age— every lad learns to use a rifle—so that the young man when his time comes for entering the national army has already acquired considerably more than the rudiments of the knowledge and habits required of him in his capacity as a soldier. It is commonly said that the Swiss Army is worth little or nothing,—that it is a bad imitation of the French Army, with inferior materiel, and scientific services too weak to be of any real value. Those who have believed this on the authority of military critics would do well to read Mr. Dixon's account of the calling out of the Swiss troops when war was declared by France in 1870, and of the manner in which the Federal Army disposed of Bour- baki's forces when they were driven across the frontier. Prussian order and foresight could never excel the promptitude of the Swiss, who in three days from Bismarck's accepting war had nearly forty thousand men under arms on their frontier, ready to repel any violation of their neutrality. Nor was it a slight trial to the courage and capacity of the Federal Commander- in-chief to have a mob of eighty thousand men, with no resources but their arms, almost loose from the control of their officers, badly led, furious with defeat and privations, suddenly driven into his keeping, and to transfer the whole mass disarmed into safe quarters without the loss of a life. We cannot venture to express an opinion as to the strictly military efficiency of the Swiss Army ; their fighting qualities were happily not tried in the late war ; but from the political point of view it is clear that they have succeeded in making an army literally co-extensive with the nation, in maintaining it at a ludicrously small cost, and most important of all, in inspiring the whole population with perfect readiness, even eagerness, to undergo any toils or dangers required for the defence of the country. It may be that if Switzerland were not a small country, necessarily neutral in the midst of far larger nations, there might be a return to the days of Granson and Marig- nano, when the Swiss were not altogether averse to aggressive war- fare ; but the phenomenon of an entire people trained to arms, yet absolutely free from the domination of the military spirit, is at least worth our careful study, before we conclude that the evils of universal military service must necessarily outweigh the advan- tages.
How far the success of the Swims educational and military systems is due to their peculiar national position and institutions is a difficult question. The Swiss are truly a race apart. With no homogeneity of race, or speech, or religion, with institutions which render not merely each canton, but each separate community an almost independent State, they are yet bound together by very close ties. Fanatics for Italian unity may talk of annexing Canton Ticino to the nation to which in language is akin ; paid agita- tors may strive to show that Geneva naturally belongs to France, whose territory since the seizure of Savoy nearly encloses her ; but the Confederated Cantons are too good friends to part, their interests and their sympathies alike draw them together. Their democracy is a genuine thing ; varying considerably in form, it yet in all cases has its roots deep in the past. It implies hearty allegiance to the free system which has come down to them through centuries, not the fiery fanaticism of new con- verts. Other nations may sucessfully cultivate democracy of other types, and flourish under it ; none but the Swiss can ever have a government like theirs, for no other has like traditions, and we English ought to know, if we do not, that no substitute is possible for the effect produced on the character of a people by long and fairly uniform traditions. We, and we alone, besides the Swiss, have a freedom which is of genuine historical growth ; is it impossible for us to attain to something analogous to the Swiss educational and military systems? More perfect our superior wealth might make them,—we surely ought not to be content with anything less.
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