XIV
YOUNG SWITZERLAND
IF we were to attempt to found our judgment upon Swiss periodical literature, we should form a very false opinion regarding the public mind of Switzerland. In this land, as everywhere, the press is from ten to twenty years behind the intellectual and moral development of the people. The Swiss papers and other periodicals are few in number, compared with those of neighbouring nations. Most of them are controlled by quite a small group of persons, and nearly every one of them serves to express the prejudices, the interests, and the routinism of middle-aged or elderly persons. Among such as are prominent in this journalistic world, even those who are spoken of as young, if they ever have been young in mind, are now so only in the eyes of their elders, of elders who refuse to admit that they have grown old.… "Young man, hold your tongue," as Job said to Magnus.[1]
A man may live a long time in this land before he discovers the existence of a young Switzerland free from the trammels of conservative liberalism (more conservative than liberal), and free from those of sectarian radicalism (preeminently sectarian). Both these trends are abundantly represented in the columns of the leading newspapers; the adherents of both are attached to the outworn political and social forms of the bourgeois regime which is declining from one end of Europe to the other.
I was surprised and delighted at what I read in the latest issues of the "Revue de la Société de Zofingue." I wish to make my French friends acquainted with what I have
- ↑ The allusion is to Victor Hugo's Les Burgraves. Burgrave Job is eighty years of age; Burgrave Magnus, his son, is sixty.—Translators' Note.
