ich and the powerful; his name
has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse
by thousands in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a
noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a popular
act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this picturesque
representative of liberty has done much to mould the political life, if
not also to write many pages of the history of the people, and that in
spite of the questionable morality of the received narrative of his
career, and its unquestionable untruth. The emergence of the Swiss from
slavery to freedom, as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly
a gradual process, and there is now every reason for believing that the
narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to
have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies
from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a
possible substratum of actual fact.

It is sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the
illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge
of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When,
however, the naked truth can be discovered--and that is seldom the
case--it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot
receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of
the former, not with the material of the latter.

As the legend of William Tell is more devoid of actual historical
foundation, and is more widely known and believed than are the many
others related as the records of events happening at the period from
which the Swiss date their independence, it may be as well to devote
some little space to its consideration. All the local records that might
possibly throw some light on the existence and career of Tell have now
been thoroughly searched by many impartial and competent scholars, as
well as by enthusiastic partisans, with the invariable result that, till
a considerable lapse of years after the presumed date of their deaths,
not one particle of evidence has been discovered tending to prove the
identity of either William Tell or of the tyrant Gessler. On the other
hand, many local authorities, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, when the story was fully established, have gone
out of their way to deny its truth and prove its entire falsity from
their own resear