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Edward A. Freeman
The Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066184674
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I.
Year by year, on certain spots among the dales and the mountain-sides of Switzerland, the traveller who is daring enough to wander out of beaten tracks and to make his journey at unusual seasons may look on a sight such as no other corner of the earth can any longer set before him. He may there gaze and feel, what none can feel but those who have seen with their own eyes, what none can feel in its fulness more than once in a lifetime, the thrill of looking for the first time face to face on freedom in its purest and most ancient form. He is there in a land where the oldest institutions of our race, institutions which may be traced up to the earliest times of which history or legend gives us any glimmering, still live on in their primæval freshness. He is in a land where an immemorial freedom, a freedom only less eternal than the rocks that guard it, puts to shame the boasted antiquity of kingly dynasties, which, by its side, seem but as innovations of yesterday. There, year by year, on some bright morning of the spring-tide, the Sovereign People, not entrusting its rights to a few of its own number, but discharging them itself in the majesty of its corporate person, meets in the open market-place or in the green meadow at the mountain’s foot, to frame the laws to which it yields obedience as its own work, to choose the rulers whom it can afford to greet with reverence as drawing their commission from itself. Such a sight there are but few Englishmen who have seen; to be among those few I reckon among the highest privileges of my life. Let me ask you to follow me in spirit to the very home and birth-place of freedom, to the land where we need not myth and fable to add aught to the fresh and gladdening feeling with which we for the first time tread the soil and drink in the air of the immemorial democracy of Uri(1). It is one of the opening days of May; it is the morning of Sunday; for men there deem that the better the day the better the deed; they deem that the Creator cannot be more truly honoured than in using, in His fear and in His presence, the highest of the gifts which He has bestowed on man. But deem not that, because the day of Christian worship is chosen for the great yearly assembly of a Christian commonwealth, the more directly sacred duties of the day are forgotten. Before we, in our luxurious island, have lifted ourselves from our beds, the men of the mountains, Catholic and Protestant alike, have already paid the morning’s worship in God’s temple. They have heard the mass of the priest or they have listened to the sermon of the pastor, before some of us have awakened to the fact that the morn of the holy day has come. And when I saw men thronging the crowded church, or kneeling, for want of space within, on the bare ground beside the open door, when I saw them marching thence to do the highest duties of men and citizens, I could hardly forbear thinking of the saying of Holy Writ, that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” From the marketplace of Altdorf, the little capital of the Canton, the procession makes its way to the place of meeting at Böblingen. First marches the little army of the Canton, an army whose weapons never can be used save to drive back an invader from their land(2). Over their heads floats the banner, the bull’s head of Uri, the ensign which led men to victory on the fields of Sempach and Morgarten. And before them all, on the shoulders of men clad in a garb of ages past, are borne the famous horns, the spoils of the wild bull of ancient days, the very horns whose blast struck such dread into the fearless heart of Charles of Burgundy(3). Then, with their lictors before them, come the magistrates of the commonwealth on horseback(4), the chief magistrate, the Landammann, with his sword by his side. The people follow the chiefs whom they have chosen to the place of meeting, a circle in a green meadow, with a pine forest rising above their heads and a mighty spur of the mountain range facing them on the other side of the valley. The multitude of freemen take their seats around the chief ruler of the commonwealth, whose term of office comes that day to an end. The Assembly opens; a short space is first given to prayer, silent prayer offered up by each man in the temple of God’s own rearing. Then comes the business of the day. If changes in the law are demanded, they are then laid before the vote of the Assembly, in which each citizen of full age has an equal vote and an equal right of speech. The yearly magistrates have now discharged all their duties; their term of office is at an end; the trust which has been placed in their hands falls back into the hands of those by whom it was given, into the hands of the sovereign people. The chief of the commonwealth, now such no longer, leaves his seat of office and takes his place as a simple citizen in the ranks of his fellows. It rests with the free will of the Assembly to call him back to his chair of office, or to set another there in his stead. Men who have neither looked into the history of the past, nor yet troubled themselves to learn what happens year by year in their own age, are fond of declaiming against the caprice and ingratitude of the people, and of telling us that under a democratic government neither men nor measures can remain for an hour unchanged. The witness alike of the present and of the past is an answer to baseless theories like these. The spirit which made democratic Athens year by year bestow her highest offices on the patrician Periklês and the reactionary Phôkiôn(5) still lives in the democracies of Switzerland, alike in the Landesgemeinde of Uri and in the Federal Assembly at Bern. The ministers of Kings, whether despotic or constitutional, may vainly envy the sure tenure of office which falls to the lot of those who are chosen to rule by the voice of the people. Alike in the whole Confederation and in the single Canton reelection is the rule; the rejection of the out-going magistrate is the rare exception(6). The Landammann of Uri, whom his countrymen have raised to the seat of honour, and who has done nothing to lose their confidence, need not fear that when he has gone to the place of meeting in the pomp of office, his place in the march homeward will be transferred to another against his will.
Such is the scene, which, save for a moment, when the world was turned upside down by the inroads of revolutionary France(7), has gone on year by year as far as history goes back in the most unchanged of European states. Let me ask you to follow me yet again to the place of assembly of a younger member of the same noble band of commonwealths(8), to pass from Uri to Appenzell, from the green meadows of Bözlingen to the hill-side market-place of Trogen. Somewhat of the pomp and circumstance which marks the assembly of Catholic and pastoral Uri is lacking in the assembly of the Protestant and industrial population of the Outer Rhodes of Appenzell. But the stamp of antiquity, the stamp of immemorial freedom, is impressed alike on the assembly and on the whole life of either commonwealth. We miss in Appenzell the solemn procession, the mounted magistrates, the military pomp, of Uri, but we find in their stead an immemorial custom which breathes perhaps more than any other the spirit of days when freedom was not a thing of course, but a thing for which men had to give their toil and, if need be, their blood. Each man who makes his way to the Landesgemeinde of Trogen bears at his side the sword which the law at once commands him to carry and forbids him to draw(9). And in the proceedings of the assembly itself, the men of Appenzell have kept