A Little Swiss Sojourn by William Dean Howells

The church itself was old -- almost as old as Swiss freedom, and older than the freedom of the Vaud. The Gothic interior, which had once, no doubt, been idolatrously frescoed and furnished with statues, was now naked and coldly Protestant; one window, partly stained, let in a little colored light to mix with the wintry day that struck through the others. The pulpit was in the centre of the church, and the clerk's desk diagonally across from it. The floor was boarded over, but a chill struck through from the stones below, and the people seemed to shiver through the service that preceded the election. When the pasteur mounted the pulpit they listened faithfully, but when the clerk led the psalm they vented their suffering in the most dreadful groaning that ever passed for singing outside of one of our country churches.

It was all very like home, and yet unlike it, for there is much more government in Switzerland than with us, and much less play of individuality. In small communes, for example, like Villeneuve, there are features of practical socialism, which have existed apparently from the earliest times. Certain things are held in common, as mountain pasturage and the forests, from which each family has a provision of fuel. These and other possessions of the commune are "confided to the public faith," and trespass is punished with signal severity. The trees are felled under government inspection, and the woods are never cut off wholesale. When a tree is chopped down a tree is planted, and the floods that ravage Italy from the mountains denuded of their forests are unknown to the wiser Swiss. Throughout Switzerland the State insures against fire, and inflicts penalties for neglect and carelessness from which fires may result. Education is compulsory, and there is a rigid military service, and a show of public force everywhere which is quite unknown to our unneighbored, easy-going republic. I should say, upon the whole, that the likeness was more in social than in political things, strange as that may appear. There seemed to be much the same freedom among young people, and democratic institutions had produced a kindred type of manners in both countries. But I will not be very confident about all this, for I might easily be mistaken. The Swiss make their social distinctions as we do; and in Geneva and Lausanne I understood that a more than American exclusivism prevailed in families that held themselves to be peculiarly good, and believed themselves very old.