That was then, this is now — the culture that is Swiss edition

Tocqueville’s notes on the Swiss constitution confirm the poor impression he had quickly formed.  There were cantons, he remarked, but no Switzerland.  In most of these, he continued, the majority of people lacked any sense of “self-government”; the Swiss habitually abused freedom of the press; they saw associations much as the French did, as a revolutionary means rather than as “a slow and quiet way to arrive at the rectification of wrongs”; they had no sense of the benefits derived from “the peaceful and legal introduction of the judge into the domain of politics”; and, finally, “at the bottom of their souls the Swiss show no deep respect for law, no love of legality, no abhorrence of the use of force, without which there cannot be a free country.”

That is from Jeremy Jennings, Travels with Tocqueville: Beyond America, a new and excellent book that I will be covering again soon.