Note (10) — Chapter I

I perhaps need hardly insist on this point after the references given in my first note; but I find it constantly needful to explain that there is no such thing as a Swiss nation in any but a political sense. The Cantons were simply members of the Empire which gradually won a greater independence than their fellows. And the Forest Cantons, and the German-speaking Swiss generally, do not even form a distinct part of the German nation; they are simply three settlements of the Alemanni, just as the three divisions of Lincolnshire are three settlements of the Angles.