A MONTH IN SWITZERLAND.*

W>•; are disposed to quarrel with the title of this volume, and with the announcement which follows it, which declares it to be not only a description of a month in Switzerland, but to be written in sequence to the author's Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Kedirj, a statement which will probably induce hundreds, as it induced the present writer, to inquire eagerly for the book, and perhaps induce in them the same feeling of really justifiable resentment. The present little book is well enough in its way, as we propose presently to show ; but Mr. Zincke's Egypt was a delightful work, full of original thought, and worth careful study. It seems hardly con- ceivable that a writer whose rare powers of perception have enabled him to trace the faintest lines that lead up to the unbeaten track of the world's ancient history, should be unaware that his present production will, in the minds of ordinary readers, bear no resem- blance to his graver work. In his preface, Mr. Zincke ex- plains,—" I will at once say to those who may have read my Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Kedive; that this little work belongs to the same family. The cast of thought and the aims of the two are kindred, and both endeavour to do their work by similar methods." This is a proposition we are of course unable to gain- say. An author must certainly be supposed to be the best judge of his own thoughts and aims. But when he proceeds to say, " They are alike efforts to attain a right reading and a right interpreta- tion of nature and of man," outsiders may be permitted to remark that the similarity of method in the two cases is not obvious to them, since in the first, thought and theory were used to elucidate facts, while, in the second, facts are used simply to illustrate theories.

Much fresh light was poured by Mr. Zincke on the history of Egypt, but no one will venture to suggest that he has added one jot to any traveller's knowledge of Switzerland. But having ex- pressed what we believe to be unjust indignation at the terms in which this little work is announced, we will proceed to the more grateful task of examining it upon its own merits, conscious that in this author's company the time will at least not pass heavily. In fact, we are amused at the outset by Mr. Zincke's declara- tion that he did not start on his expedition because he felt any desire for change; that indeed, on the contrary, he has " never felt any necessity for this modern nostrum," which is not wonderful, if we consider that, without any such wish or such necessity,.he is familiar with almost every county in Eng- land, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, has " male some long journeys beyond the four seas, and set foot on each of the four continents, and this the result not of planning, but merely taking things as they came." Possibly the secret of Mr. Zincke's never having felt the need of " the modern nostrum" may be that he • A Month in Switzerland. By F. Barham Zincke. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. 1873.

has had to take it in such abundant doses. One of the principal points in his little work is the impression made upon his mind by the condition of the inhabitants of the valley of the Visp. And in his comments on the time when the whole valley was the bed of a glacier, we have an illustration of that descriptive power, the wonderful clearness of which (sparingly as he has used it in this volume) is one of the happiest features in Mr. Zincke's writing. He observes :-

"Geologists are now pretty well agreed that the Lake of Geneva itself was excavated by this old glacier. Its power, at all events, was adequate to the task. It was 100 miles long, and near 4,000 feet in thickness at the head of the lake, as can now be seen by the striat ad marking it left on the overhanging mountains. It acted both as a rasp—its under-side being set with teeth, formed of the rocks it had picked up on its way, or which had fallen into it through its cre- vasses ; and also as a scoop, pushing before it all that it could thrust out of its way. And what could not such a tool rasp away and scoop out, at a point where its rasping and scooping were brought into play, as it slid along, thicker than Snowdon is high above the sea, and im- pelled by the pressure of tho 100 miles of descending glacier behind, that then filled the whole broad valley up to and beyond Oherwal.1 ? It was wasting aviay as it approached the site of the modern city, where it must have quite come to an end, for the lake here shoals to nothing ; there could, therefore, have, then, been no more rasping and scooping. At the head of the lake, where the glacier-tool was tilted into the position for rasping and scooping vigorously, the water, notwithstanding subsequent detrital depositions, is 900 feet deep."

But the aspect of the country, its geological formation, and its wonderful beauty and grandeur, are subordinated, for the time, at least, in our author's mind, to the important question of the con- dition of its peasantry, and more important still, the relation of that question to the condition of our peasants at home. Conscious that this subject is, as it were, the root-thought in his mind, with a quiet smile at himself, Mr. 'Zincke heads the chapter he devotes to its consideration with a singularly appropriate line from Shakespeare :—

"But what said Jaques?

Did he not moralise the spectacle ?"

He then proceeds to suppose the valley of the Visp to contain 4,000 acres of irrigated meadow and of corn and garden ground.

He assumes that each family shall, on a rough average, be

said to consist of six souls, and that from a rough esti- mate of the producing power of the land, at least an

acre and a half will be necessary to supply breadstuff for each family ; then the necessity is inferred for a certain number of cows, hay, &c., till we have the result that the 4,000 acres with which we started shall, by very rigid subdivision and painstaking cultivation, be found capable of supporting the ex- istence of 6,000 persons. Then arises, of course, the question, " What kind of life, what kind of men and women, does this state of things produce ?" And the result given is, that under such conditions, intellectual life is impossible in the valley, the conditions requisite for it being completely absent, but that with undeniable power it will teach the virtues which under such circumstances lie at the very root of existence, namely, industry, prudence, patience, frugality, and honesty. And here our " Jaques" enters into a not uninteresting aside on the educating power of different forms of property, with a glance at the contrast presented between the picture he has drawn of life in the valley of the Visp, " and the destitution, squalor, and vice, not of our great cities only, but even of our Visp sides." Further on, he mentions the fact, so advantageous to the Swiss peasant, of the abundant supply of good water provided in every village, and calls attention to the amount of human selfish- ness which has been at work to hinder a like good being within the reach of every English labourer, and the consequent amount of almost compulsory drunkenness. The present writer but too easily called to mind a hamlet, not many miles from Maidstone, where the whole air in summer is polluted by the stench arising from an open ditch close to the line of cottages, the filthy water

of which is the only supply vouchsafed to the inhabitants. In answer to an inquiry, the reply was, there was always low fever in that village. But the bright side of the Swiss picture would not be faithful, if even at its best it were not tempered by reflections, which we cannot do better than give in Mr. Zincke's own words :— " Its virtues are, doubtless, very pleasing to contemplate; but they are not of quite the highest order. The industry before us is very honourable. The mind dwells on the sight of it with satisfaction. But as it only issues in the barest subsistence, the observation of this some- what clouds our satisfaction. There are, too, higher forms of industry of which nothing can be known here—the industry of those who live laborious days, and scorn delights, from the desire to improve man's estate, to extort the secrets of nature for his benefit, to clear away obstacles which are hindering men from seeing the truth, to add to the intellectual wealth of the race, to smootho the path i of virtue, and make virtue itself appear more attractive.. Such industry is more honourable, and more blessed both to him who labours I and to those who participate in the fruits of his labour. And such pru- dence, frugality, and forethought as aro practised iu the valley are very honourable, and the mind dwells on tho sight of them, too, with satis- faction. But he who belongs to the outside world will hero again bo disposed to repeat the observation just made. It is true that that inan's understanding and heart must be out of harmony with the conditions of this life, and therefore repulsive to us, who does not gather up the frag- ments that nothing ba lost, but when this is done only for self. and those who are to us as ourselves. though so done unavoidably through the necessity of the cast, it is somewhat chilling and hardening. And it is not satisfactory that so much thought and care should be expended only upon the best use of the means of life—those moans, too, being sadly restricted ; for a higher application of these virtues would be to the bast use of life itself."

We next get a consideration of the case of this Visp valley and its inhabitants under totally different conditions, namely, supposing the land held by one or two great landlords ; and here it would not be difficult to see that Mr. Zincke was taking up his parable, even if he did not plainly intimate as much :—

" Wo have now endeavoured, first, to analyse tho land-system of the valley, such as it presents itself to the eye of a contemplative pedes- trian; and which may be regarded as the natural working-out of pro- prietorship iu land, when it is the sale means of supporting life. Wo then proceeded to compare with this a system we wot of, carried out to its full-blown development. This second system is what people refer to when they talk of English landlordism. These two forms, however, of the distribution and tenure of land aro very far from exhausting all that have existed. and that do and that might exist. Distribution and tenure aro capable of assuming many other forms ; and some of these must be considered. before we can hope to arrive at anything like a right and serviceable understanding of the matter."

The picture and the parable are succeeded by a prophecy, and we have in the next sixty pages a consideration of the probable effect of the present era of capital upon ourselves and our neighbours, with many valuable suggestions upon the application of the joint- stock principle to farming, and upon cultivation by steam. We have only space for a few sentences : —

" Lord Derby tells us the land ought to yield twice as much as it does now. We may, I suppose, set the present gross produce of good average land fairly fanned at £10 an acre. If land highly cultivated by steam, and with the liberal application of capital we aro supposing, would advance its produce to only half of Lord Derby's supposed possi- ble increase, the gross yielld would be £15 an acre. And this might give, after allowing one-third for working expenses, deterioration, and insurance, £131 per cont. on the investment ; but we will put the working at half, which will leave a profit of 10 per cent. If this could be done, then the streams of English capital that are perennially flow- ing off into all countries would be profitably diverted to the cultivation and enrichment of our own land ; and no small portion of the other millions we are year by year paying the foreigner for food might be paid to food-manufacturers of our own, and so saved to the country. France produces at home its own sugar; and besides, sends to us 60,000 tons a year. We do not manufacture sugar at home, because an English tenant would not spend £8,000, if ho had it, in erecting a sugar factory on another man's land ; but such firms of proprietors could, and probably would, on their own. Capital swept away the peasant proprietor. It has almost swept away the 50-acre tenant. And it will sweep away the 250-acre tenant. But it offers to all better careers than those it closes against them. The system it is bringing upon us will employ more hands, and will require them all to be better men, and will pay them all better, both for their work and for their capital. Under it there will be openings everywhere for everyone to become what be is fit to become. This will be a premium on education ; and it will do more to suppress drunkenness in the rural districts than any conceivable licensing, or permissive, or prohibitory Acts."

We cannot continue Mr. Zincke's line of argument further, though he enters into it with all the zest of a man who has thought much and carefully upon the subjects he touches. On the questions of education, disestablishment, agricultural co-operation, &c., he has something to say, and generally something worth the atten- tion of the thoughtful reader ; but it is by a distinct effort of the mind, that the reader, if not the writer, of what forms a paren- thesis of at least a hundred pages iu this volume, turns the leaf at last, and understands why he is met with the words, " Sept. 4—Started at 6 a.m.," &c. We had forgotten we were reading the jottings in a tourist's note-book. however, we have a few chapters of description before us, interspersed with grumbles more brilliant than true against Swiss hotels, or at least our author must have been singularly unfortunate, since he tells us (though spending at the rate of thirty shillings a head a day ou an expedition that was largely pedestrian) he cord 1 only get for breakfast, "coffee, two kinds of bread, the more solid kinds almost always sticky and sour, having been made from imperfectly ripened and imperfectly-harvested grain, butter somewhat insipid, and honey that will inevitably soil your fingers, and perhaps trouble your interior." Then, as to dinner, he observes,—" It is always the same. As the dinner-bell reminds you of this, you find you are agitated by an involuntary shudder. There is the inevit- able filet de Leval; more inevitable than the conscience of an evil deed, for that does not rise up before you throughout your whole life every day. One feels one could almost give a year's income never to see or hear mention of this filet de boeuf any more." The

same sense of discomfort (and this at first-class hotels, mind,) pur- sues the unhappy victim to his bedroom, and a description which we hope is intended for mere caricature is finished with the remark,—

" As to the traveller himself, he soon conies to find that he is not regarded as a thinking, feeling, and acting, or in any way independent entity. He is not supposed to have any likes or dislikes; any wants or ways of his own ; he is merely one of the constituent molecules of an aggregated mass of inert, insentient matter, which must be manipulated in a certain fixed manner, which the discoveries of hotel science have shown to be necessary in order to produce a certain determinate result in the form of a certain amount of profit."

We have a most interesting account of Mr. Zincke's visit to the Museum at Zurich. Out of the collection of objects found at the bottom of the Lake he weaves for us a history of the ancient inhabitants of the Lake villages, a history precious in the eyes of the antiquarian and the philosopher. Whether it happened that revelling in these relics of the past disposed Mr. Zincke to look with special kindness on the city of which that past was the germ, we cannot say, but certain it is that the one exception to his sweeping condemnation of Swiss hotels is Baur's Hotel at Zurich, of which he speaks in terms of the highest commendation.

We have not left ourselves space, and we have little inclination, to criticise the religious element in this book. One of the acutest of observers, as well as best of modern divines, has called atten- tion to the unequal development of the nature of many men of science, and to this class, clergyman though he be, our author specially belongs. 'They give up their whole life and all its energy," says the writer to whom we have alluded, " to the study of physical phenomena, and put aside any suggestions of spiritual feeling which may come to them in their work, as disturbing elements dimming the dry light in which they toil. It is no wonder that their spiritual faculty becomes dwarfed and para- lysed." In the instance before us, no one can read the passages on the " Construction of Religious Thought," on " Theological Training," &c., without a distinct consciousness that the spiritual faculty of the writer has in some way been injured by severe com- pression. But apart from religion, from Switzerland, or from Egypt, there is quite enough in this little voletme to arrest the attention

of anybody who cares for an hour's intercourse, with the mind of one who has carefully pondered some of the deepest problems

which affect the physical well-being of his fellow-creatures.