THE Swiss people today preserve that element of the paradoxical which in the Middle Ages produced an Arnold Winkelried, courageous to gather the spears of a foe into his bosom for the sake of his country, and thousands of other heroes willing to give almost as great service to any cause for the sake of […]

THOUGH Switzerland does not contain within its borders more than one-third of the Alps, and the greatest height of the Alpine range (Mount Blanc) is wholly within France, the Alps are always associated with Switzerland in the popular mind ; and with good reason, for the country is particularly and almost wholly Alpine in its […]

To her lakes rather than to her mountains Switzerland owed the beginnings of civilization. Nowadays, as the curtains of mist are rolled away from the past by geologist and anthropologist, we are coming to a clearer idea of the origins of this wonderful civilisation of ours, which makes the common routine of a plain citizen […]

THROUGHOUT the Middle Ages Switzerland and the Swiss were always in the eye of Europe. Sometimes the spectacle they presented was that of a patriot people pushing back the tyrant and the invader with an unearthly courage, and luck more unearthly still. Sometimes it was that of a martial clan, safe in a great mountain […]

THERE is carved in the face of a great rock at Lucerne a lion, wounded to death, resting upon a broken spear. It is the monument of the Swiss Guard massacred in the defence of the Tuileries at Paris in 1792. The close connection between France and Switzerland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made […]

It  has not produced much native literary genius. The literary associations of the land are mostly concerned with strangers who went to it as a land of refuge or as visitors. True, in the thirteenth century Zurich was famous for its poets, for its share in the making of the Nibelungen and the Minnelieder, and […]

THE Swiss have had always a natural bent towards the heterodox. They have the spirit of that exile from Erin who, landing in New York and being asked as to the state of his political soul, demanded : ” Is there a government here ? If so I am agin it.” Some of the minor […]

THE avalanche is chiefly associated in the mind of the visitor to Switzerland with thoughts of peril and destruction, the glacier with the idea of a permanent field of ice set decoratively to adorn a mountainside. Neither impression represents all of the truth. Avalanches are destructive, and glaciers decorative. But the avalanche is normally, to […]

THERE is a great distinction between the national sports of the Swiss and those of Switzerland. The games which attract so many thousands to the Alps in winter are in no cases peculiar to Switzerland, and are rarely indigenous. Tobogganing and skiing, like mountain-climbing (as a pleasure), have been introduced to Switzerland by visitors. Even […]

COMING to the end of the limits set for this volume, the writer finds that many aspects of Swiss life have been perforce neglected. No space could be found, for example, to deal with the educational system, which both in its primary and secondary forms and in – its devotion to technical instruction has aroused […]