Edward Freeman - The Growth of the English Constitution

But deem not that, because the day of Christian worship is chosen for the great yearly assembly of a Christian commonwealth, the more directly sacred duties of the day are forgotten. Before we, in our luxurious island, have lifted ourselves from our beds, the men of the mountains, Catholic and Protestant alike, have already paid the morning’s worship in God’s temple. They have heard the mass of the priest or they have listened to the sermon of the pastor, before some of us have awakened to the fact that the morn of the holy day has come. And when I saw men thronging the crowded church, or kneeling, for want of space within, on the bare ground beside the open door, when I saw them marching thence to do the highest duties of men and citizens, I could hardly forbear thinking of the saying of Holy Writ, that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” From the marketplace of Altdorf, the little capital of the Canton, the procession makes its way to the place of meeting at Böblingen. First marches the little army of the Canton, an army whose weapons never can be used save to drive back an invader from their land 2. Over their heads floats the banner, the bull’s head of Uri, the ensign which led men to victory on the fields of Sempach and Morgarten. And before them all, on the shoulders of men clad in a garb of ages past, are borne the famous horns, the spoils of the wild bull of ancient days, the very horns whose blast struck such dread into the fearless heart of Charles of Burgundy 3. Then, with their lictors before them, come the magistrates of the commonwealth on horseback 4, the chief magistrate, the Landammann, with his sword by his side. The people follow the chiefs whom they have chosen to the place of meeting, a circle in a green meadow, with a pine forest rising above their heads and a mighty spur of the mountain range facing them on the other side of the valley. The multitude of freemen take their seats around the chief ruler of the commonwealth, whose term of office comes that day to an end. The Assembly opens; a short space is first given to prayer, silent prayer offered up by each man in the temple of God’s own rearing. Then comes the business of the day. If changes in the law are demanded, they are then laid before the vote of the Assembly, in which each citizen of full age has an equal vote and an equal right of speech. The yearly magistrates have now discharged all their duties; their term of office is at an end; the trust which has been placed in their hands falls back into the hands of those by whom it was given, into the hands of the sovereign people. The chief of the commonwealth, now such no longer, leaves his seat of office and takes his place as a simple citizen in the ranks of his fellows. It rests with the free will of the Assembly to call him back to his chair of office, or to set another there in his stead. Men who have neither looked into the history of the past, nor yet troubled themselves to learn what happens year by year in their own age, are fond of declaiming against the caprice and ingratitude of the people, and of telling us that under a democratic government neither men nor measures can remain for an hour unchanged. The witness alike of the present and of the past is an answer to baseless theories like these. The spirit which made democratic Athens year by year bestow her highest offices on the patrician Periklês and the reactionary Phôkiôn 5still lives in the democracies of Switzerland, alike in the Landesgemeinde of Uri and in the Federal Assembly at Bern. The ministers of Kings, whether despotic or constitutional, may vainly envy the sure tenure of office which falls to the lot of those who are chosen to rule by the voice of the people. Alike in the whole Confederation and in the single Canton reelection is the rule; the rejection of the out-going magistrate is the rare exception 6. The Landammann of Uri, whom his countrymen have raised to the seat of honour, and who has done nothing to lose their confidence, need not fear that when he has gone to the place of meeting in the pomp of office, his place in the march homeward will be transferred to another against his will.

Such is the scene, which, save for a moment, when the world was turned upside down by the inroads of revolutionary France 7, has gone on year by year as far as history goes back in the most unchanged of European states. Let me ask you to follow me yet again to the place of assembly of a younger member of the same noble band of commonwealths 8, to pass from Uri to Appenzell, from the green meadows of Bözlingen to the hill-side market-place of Trogen. Somewhat of the pomp and circumstance which marks the assembly of Catholic and pastoral Uri is lacking in the assembly of the Protestant and industrial population of the Outer Rhodes of Appenzell. But the stamp of antiquity, the stamp of immemorial freedom, is impressed alike on the assembly and on the whole life of either commonwealth. We miss in Appenzell the solemn procession, the mounted magistrates, the military pomp, of Uri, but we find in their stead an immemorial custom which breathes perhaps more than any other the spirit of days when freedom was not a thing of course, but a thing for which men had to give their toil and, if need be, their blood. Each man who makes his way to the Landesgemeinde of Trogen bears at his side the sword which the law at once commands him to carry and forbids him to draw 9. And in the proceedings of the assembly itself, the men of Appenzell have kept one ancient rite, which surpasses all that I have ever seen or heard of in its heart-stirring solemnity. When the newly chosen Landammann enters on his office, his first duty is to bind himself by an oath to obey the laws of the commonwealth over which he is called to rule. His second duty is to administer to the multitude before him the same oath by which he has just bound himself. To hear the voice of thousands of freemen pledging themselves to obey the laws which they themselves have made is a moment in one’s life which can never be forgotten, a moment for whose sake it would be worth while to take a far longer and harder journey than that which leads us to Uri or Appenzell.

And now I may be asked why I have begun a discourse on the constitution of England with a picture of the doings of two small commonwealths whose political and social state is so widely different from our own. I answer that I have done so because my object is, not merely to speak of the constitution of England in the shape which the changes of fourteen hundred years have at last given it, but to trace back those successive changes to the earliest times which either history or tradition sets before us. In the institutions of Uri and Appenzell, and in others of the Swiss Cantons which have never departed from the primæval model, we may see the institutions of our own forefathers, the institutions which were once common to the whole Teutonic race, institutions whose outward form has necessarily passed away from greater states, but which contain the germs out of which every free constitution in the world has grown. Let us look back to the earliest picture which history can give us of the political and social being of our own forefathers. In the Germany of Tacitus we have the picture of the institutions of the Teutonic race before our branch of that race sailed from the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser to seek new homes by the Humber and the Thames. There, in the picture of our fathers and brethren seventeen hundred years back, the free Teutonic Assembly, the armed Assembly of the whole people, is set before us, well nigh the same, in every essential point, as it may still be seen in Uri, Unterwalden, Glarus, and Appenzell. One point however must be borne in mind. In the assemblies of those small Cantons it is only the most democratic side of the old Teutonic constitution which comes prominently into sight. The commonwealth of Uri, by the peculiar circumstances of its history, grew into an independent and sovereign state. But in its origin it was not a nation, it was not even a tribe 10. The Landesgemeinden of which I have been speaking are the Assemblies, not of a nation but of a district; they answer in our own land, not to the Assemblies of the whole Kingdom, but to the lesser Assemblies of the shire or the hundred. But they are not on that account any the less worthy of our notice, they do not on that account throw any the less light on that common political heritage which belongs alike to Swabia and to England. In every Teutonic land which still keeps any footsteps of its ancient institutions, the local divisions are not simply administrative districts traced out for convenience on the map. In fact, they are not divisions at all; they are not divisions of the Kingdom, but the earlier elements out of whose union the Kingdom grew. Yorkshire, by that name, is younger than England, but Yorkshire, by its elder name of Deira, is older than England 11. And Yorkshire or Deira itself is younger than the smaller districts of which it is made up, Craven, Cleveland, Holderness, and others. The Landesgemeinde of Uri answers, not to an Assembly of all England, not to an Assembly of all Deira, but to an Assembly of Holderness or Cleveland. But in the old Teutonic system the greater aggregate was simply organized after the model of the lesser elements out of whose union it was formed. In fact, for the political unit, for the atom which joined with its fellow atoms to form the political whole, we must go to areas yet smaller than those of Holderness or Uri. That unit, that atom, the true kernel of all our political life, must be looked for in Switzerland in the Gemeinde or Commune ; in England – smile not while I say it – in the parish vestry 12.

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