t he had not voted
at home might deposit his ballot in any other. The church bell rang for
the people to assemble, and the voting began and ended in perfect quiet.
But I could not witness an election of this ancient republic, where
Freedom was so many centuries old, without strong emotion; it had from
its nature and the place the consecration of a religious rite.

III

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
amo