14.Switzerland, the Country of High Mountains, Excellent Schools and a Unified People Who Speak Four Different Languages

THE Swiss are apt to call their country the Helvetian Confederation, and a rather dowdy lady, called Helvetia, is apt to appear upon the coins and stamps of the twenty-two independent little republics whose representatives gather together at the capital city of Berne to discuss the affairs of the common fatherland.

Since the war, when the greater part of the country(70% of the people speak German,20%speak French,6%speak Italian and 2%speak Romonsch)was more or less on the side of the Germans(although maintaining a most scrupulous neutrality),the image of a slightly idealized young hero by the name of William Tell has somewhat tended to replace the Helvetian goddess who, I am sorry to say, was beginning to look more and more like Britannia as she was depicted by the eminent artists of the mid-Victorian period in England. This conflict of coin and stamp deities(they are not restricted to Switzerland;almost any country has one of these queer problems)clearly shows the dual nature of the Swiss Republic.To the outside world, all this is of very little importance.Switzerland, to those of us who are not of Swiss origin, is merely the country of the picturesque mountain-ranges and it is of these that I shall speak in the present chapter.

The Alps, which stretch from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, are almost twice as long as Great Britain and contain about the same amount of territory. Sixteen thousand square miles of this land belong to Switzerland(Denmark is just about as large)and of these 16,000 square miles,12,000 are productive in some way because they are covered with forests or vineyards or small bits of pasture.Four thousand square miles are of no use to anybody because they are either covered by the water of the big lakes or form part of some picturesque precipice;and 700 square miles are covered by glaciers.As a result, Switzerland has only 250 inhabitants per square mile, while Belgium has 655,and Germany 347.But Norway has only 22 per square mile, and Sweden has 35,and the idea therefore that Switzerland is merely a sort of gigantic mountain resort, inhabited exclusively by hotel-keepers and their guests is slightly erroneous.For Switzerland, aside from its dairy products, has turned the wide northern plateau between the Alps and the Tura into one of the most prosperous industrial countries of Europe, and it has been able to do so without the help of any raw materials.It has of course a superabundance of waterpower, and furthermore it enjoys a very favorable position right in the heart of Europe, which makes it possible for the finished products of the Helvetian Republic to slide quietly but continuously into at least a dozen surrounding countries.

In a previous chapter I tried to give you an idea of the origin of all such complicated masses of mountain-ridges as are represented by the Alps and the Pyrenees. I told you to take half a dozen clean handkerchiefs, unfold them and put them on top of each other and push them together and then watch the wrinkles and the creases and double-jointed circles and crumples that are the result of such a forcible concentration.The table on which you performed this geological operation was the original base or core of granite(countless millions of years old)across which the younger layers folded themselves during subsequent millions of years, to become those queerly shaped pinnacles which were given their present form and aspect by still other millions of years of incessant wind and rain and snow and ice.

These enormous folds, from ten to twelve thousand feet above the plains, have gradually crumbled into a series of parallel ranges. But in the center of the country(the village of Andermatt on the Gothard pass is the geographical center of the country)they meet in a vast complex of mountains(the so-called St.Gothard range)which send the Rhine on its course towards the North Sea, the Rhône on its way to the Mediterranean, and which also give birth to those mountain rivers which feed the lakes of Thun, of Lucerne and Zürich in the north, and the famous Italian lakes in the south.And it is precisely in this neighborhood of glaciers and precipices and valleys, so deep that they hardly ever see the rays of the sun, in this region of avalanches and impassable mountain streams, green with the chilly waters of a dozen glaciers, that the Swiss Republic took its origin.

As usual it was a combination of practical politics with certain geographical peculiarities of the land which gave the Swiss their first chance to make a bid for independence. For almost a thousand years the half-savage peasants of these inaccessible valleys had been left alone by all their more powerful neighbors.What was the use of hoisting the proud standard of empire when there was no plunder?At best one could deprive these wild men of a couple of cow-hides.But they were dangerous barbarians with their aptitude for guerrilla warfare and those uncomfortable boulders that came crashing down from the hillsides and that would squash a suit of armor as if it were a piece of parchment, and so the Swiss were treated as the original settlers of the Atlantic coast treated the Indians that lived behind the Alleghenies—they were ignored.

But with the rising importance of the Papacy and the tremendous upward sweep of Italian commerce during and immediately after the Crusades, northern Europe felt a very sincere need of a more direct and convenient route from Germany to Italy than those provided by the St. Bernard Pass(which necessitated a long detour by way of Lyons and the entire Rhône valley, via the lake of Geneva)or the Brenner Pass, which meant that one had to cross the Habsburg domains with their almost unbearable tariff rates.

It was then that the peasants of the Cantons(the name for the independent little Swiss republics or districts)of Unterwalden, Uri and Schwyz decided to combine and each spend a little money(Heaven knows, they did not have much)upon the road that led from the valley of the Rhine to the valley of the Ticino River. They cut down certain parts of the rock.When ever the rocks were too hard to be removed by means of pick-axes(try and make a mountain road without dynamite!)they made narrow wooden contraptions which they hung from the side of the mountain walls to circumnavigate difficult corners;and they built some primitive stone bridges across the Rhine, Which hitherto had been impassable except by pedestrians during the height of the summer.Part of the way they followed the road that had been traced by the engineers of Charlemagne, four centuries before, but had never been completed;and by the end of the thirteenth century a merchant with a caravan of packmules could travel from Basel to Milan by way of the St.Gothard Pass with a fair assurance that he would not lose more than two or three of his animals on account of broken legs and falling stones.

As early as the year 1331 we hear of the existence of a hospice on top of the pass and although it was not opened to carriages until 1820 it was soon one of the most popular routes for commerce between the south and the north.

Of course the good people of Unterwalden, Uri and Schwyz allowed themselves to be paid a slight remuneration for all the trouble they had taken. This steady revenue, together with the impetus this international traffic gave to such cities as Lucerne and Zürich, gave these small peasant communities a new feeling of independence which no doubt had a great deal to do with their open defiance of the Habsburg family.The latter, curiously enough, was also originally of Swiss peasant stock, although they did not mention this fact in any of the genealogies which were preserved in their home castle of Habichtsburg(or Hawk’s Nest)that stood near the spot where the river Aar flows into the Rhine.

I am sorry to be quite so prosaic but it was the tangible revenue derived from a busily patronized Alpine trade-route rather than the bravery of a non-existent William Tell which was responsible for the foundation of what afterwards developed into the modern Swiss Republic. That modern Swiss Republic is a highly interesting political experiment built firmly upon one of the most efficient public-school systems of the world.The governmental machine runs so smoothly and so effectively that even Swiss citizens have to think for a moment when you ask them suddenly who happens to be their President.For their country is run by a Bundesrat—a sort of Board of Managers—composed of seven members, and every year they appoint a new President(usually the Vice-President of the previous year)and custom, though not law, provides that one year he shall belong to the German-speaking part of the country, the next year to the French-speaking part, and the third year to the Italian-speaking sub-division.

This President, however, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the President of the United States of America. He is merely the temporary chairman of a Federal Executive which expresses its will through the mouths of seven individual members.The President, apart from presiding over the meetings of the federal council, is minister of foreign affairs, but his position is so inconspicuous that he has no official residence.There is no Swiss“White House”.When distinguished strangers have to be entertained, the party is given in the rooms of the foreign office, and even those parties bear more resemblance to a simple bierfest in a little mountain village than to the semi-royal receptions of the French presidents or their American colleagues.

The main details of the administration are too complicated to be mentioned here but the visitor to this part of the Alps is constantly being reminded that somewhere or other an intelligent and honest person is constantly on the watch to see that things are being done and are being done both honestly and intelligently.

Take the matter of railroading, which is of course connected with innumerable difficulties. The two main arteries that connect Italy with northern Europe run straight through the heart of the Swiss Alps.The Mount Cenis tunnel connects Paris with Turin(the ancient capital of the kingdom of Savoy)by way of Dijon and Lyons.And the Brenner line provides a direct communication between southern Germany and Vienna, but although it crosses the Alps it does not pass through any tunnel.The Simplon line and the St.Gothard lines however are not only tunnel-borers but veritable mountain-climbers.The Gothard is the older of the two.It was begun in 1872 and finished ten years later.It took eight years to dig the tunnel which is nine and a half miles long and reaches a height of almost 4000 feet.Even more interesting than the tunnel itself are the spiral tunnels between Wassen and Goeschenen.Since the valleys were so narrow that they offered no room for even a single track, the railroad had to do its climbing through the heart of the mountains themselves.Outside of these special tunnels there are fifty-nine other tunnels(several of them almost a mile long),nine large viaducts and forty-eight bridges.

The second most important transalpine road, that of the Simplon, offers us a direct route between Paris and Milan by way of Dijon, Lausanne and the valley of the Rhône as far as Brieg.It was opened for traffic in the year 1906,exactly a century after Napoleon had finished his famous Simplon Pass road with its 250 big and 350 small bridges and its ten long tunnels, the greatest piece of roadbuilding the world had ever seen.The Simplon road, which was much easier to construct than that of the St.Gothard, follows the slowly ascending valley of the Rhône until it reaches a spot about 2000 feet high where the tunnel begins.This tunnel is twelve and a half miles long and provided with double tracks.So is the Løtschberg tunnel(nine miles long)which connects northern Switzerland with the Simplon road and western Italy.

Although one of the narrowest of all mountain-ranges, the so-called Pennine Alps, through which the Simplon road runs, have a climate all their own. There are no fewer than twenty-one peaks of 12,000 feet or more within this small quadrangle and 140 glaciers feed the turbulent streams, which have a most annoying habit of washing away railroad bridges just a few minutes, before the arrival of one of the big international express trains.That there never have been any wrecks on account of these aquatic surprise parties speaks highly for the efficiency of the Swiss railroad men.But as I have said before, in this somewhat stiff and rather bureaucratic republic, nothing much is left to chance.Life is too difficult and too dangerous to encourage the amiable philosophy of“muddling through”.Somewhere, somehow, some one is forever watching, observing, paving attention.

That such a general tendency towards a rather schoolmasterish punctuality and efficiency does not make for artistic success is a well-known fact. In the line of literature and the arts—painting, sculpture or music—the Swiss have never produced anything that has travelled far beyond their own narrow confines.But then, the world is full of“artistic”nations while only a few can boast of centuries of uninterrupted political and economic growth and development.And the system suits the average Swiss and his wife.What more can we ask?