Note (1) — Chapter I

What I say of Uri and the other democratic Cantons must not be misunderstood, as if I all accepted the now exploded dreams which made out the Waldstädte or Forest Cantons to have had some special origin, and some special independence, apart from the rest of Germany. The researches of modern scholars have shown, not only that the Forest Cantons were members of the Empire like their neighbours, but that various lesser lords, spiritual and temporal, held different rights within them. Their acquisition of perfect independence, even their deliverance from other lords and promotion to the state of Reichsunmittelbarkeit or immediate dependence on the Empire, was a work of time. Thus Uri itself, or part of it, was granted in 853 by Lewis the German to the Abbey of Nuns (Fraumünster) in Zürich, and it was not till 1231 that its independence of any lord but the Emperor was formally acknowledged. But the universal supremacy of the Empire in no way interfered with the internal constitution of any district, city, or principality; nor was such interference necessarily implied even in subjection to some intermediate lord. The rule of a female monastery especially would be very light. And from the earliest times we find both the men of Uri in general and the men of particular parts of the district (Gemeinden, Communes, or parishes) spoken of as communities capable of acting together, and even of treating with those who claimed to be their masters. (“Nos inhabitantes Uroniam” appear in a deed of 955 as capable of making an agreement with the officer of the Abbey at Zürich.) All this is in no way peculiar to the Forest Cantons; it is no more than what we find everywhere; what is peculiar is that, whereas elsewhere the old local communities gradually died out, in the Forest Cantons they lived and flourished, and gained new rights and powers till they grew into absolutely independent commonwealths. I think therefore that I have a right to speak of the democracy of Uri as immemorial. It is not immemorial in its fully developed shape, but that fully developed shape grew step by step out of earlier forms which are strictly immemorial and common to the whole Teutonic race.

On the early history of the democratic Cantons, a subject than which none has been more thoroughly misunderstood, I am not able to point to any one trustworthy work in English. Among the writings of Swiss scholars—shut up for the most part from readers of other nations in the inaccessible Transactions of local Societies—there is a vast literature on the subject, of the whole of which I am far from pretending to be master. But I may refer to the Essai sur l’Etat des Personnes et la Condition des Terres dans le Pays d’Ury au XIII^e Siècle, by the Baron Frederick de Gingins-la-Sarraz, in the Archiv für schweizerische Geschichte, i. 17; to Dr. J. R. Burckhardt’s Untersuchungen über die erste Bevölkerung des Alpengebirgs in the same collection, iv. 3; to the early chapters of the great work of Bluntschli, Geschichte des schweizerischen Bundesrechtes (Zürich, 1849), and of Blumer’s Staats-und Rechtsgeschichte der schweizerischen Demokratien (St. Gallen, 1850); to Dr. Alfons Huber, Die Waldstaette (Innsbruck, 1861), and Dr. Wilhelm Vischer, Die Sage von der Befreiung der Waldstädte (Leipzig, 1867). Dr. H. von Liebenau, in Die Tell-Sage zu dem Jahre 1230, takes a line of his own. The results of the whole inquiry will be found in the most accessible form in M. Albert Rilliet’s Les Origines de la Confédération Suisse (Genève et Bâle, 1868).