The point which merits attention in Glaris, is the care the communes have taken to preserve a sufficient extent of arable landfor distribution among the members. If the number of inhabitants increases, or if any parcels are sold for manufactories orprivate building purposes, the commune purchases fresh land, that the portion of each family may remain the same. Awidow, children living together without parents, or even a son or daughter of full age, provided they have had "fire andlight" within the commune for the space of a year, are alike entitled to a share. These shares vary from 10 to 30 ares,according to the extent of the communal territory. Each member retains his lot for ten, twenty, or thirty years: at the end ofthis period, the parcels are re-formed, measured, and again assigned by lot. Every one makes what use he likes of his plot,cultivating whatever he requires. He can even let it or lease it to the commune, which will pay him rent for it. These parcels,which lie close to the dwelling-houses, are admirably cultivated. They are actual gardens; and commonly let at the rate of 3francs an are. Every member may send on to the common pasture the cattle which he has kept through the winter; but hepays a tax per head, except for goats, which are the 'poor man's cow and the favourite animal in the canton, to which it givesthe famous cheese, schabzieger .
There are also in this district many private corporations which own lands. Ten, twenty, or thirty cultivators form anassociation possessing pasture and arable land. (8) The produce of the joint property is divided among the associates inproportion to the number of shares which each possesses. In the village of Schwaendi, the commune can only assign to eachfamily a few ares of cultivated land; but, thanks to these joint-properties, each member farms on the average 12 ares of land;and many of them have double that quantity. We have here, then, a perfect type of cooperative societies applied toagriculture, which have lasted for centuries, and which contrihute in no small degree to the well-being of those whoparticipate in them. The same spirit of association led the inhabitants of Schwaendi to establish a cooperative society forconsumption as well as production; and such a society exists now in the majority of the industrial communes.
It is remarkable to see in this country the agrarian organization of a most remote period in combination with the conditionsof modern industry, and how the right of occupation in the common mark betters the lot of the workman in the greatmanufactures. Glaris is not, like Uri and Unterwalden, a purely pastoral canton; it is one of the districts of Europe whererelatively the largest number of hands are employed in industrial occupations. Out of 30,000 inhabitants, 10,000 live directlyby such occupations, and nearly all the others indirectly. Here, thanks to the communal property, the workmen of thecommune obtain, of right and without payment, what the workmen's building societies at Mulhouse secure to their memberson payment of a certain sum, viz., a garden for the growth of vegetables. There is, moreover, this difference: at Mulhousethe garden is a scrap of a few square yards; at Glaris it is a field for the cultivation of potatoes, vegetables, and fruits. Nearlyall the members of the commune can keep a cow, or at any rate some goats. They have their house, and pay little or notaxes. The expenses of the public service are defrayed out of the revenue of property set apart for the purpose. The school,the church, the board of charity, have their separate alp, forest and arable, the produce of which is sufficient for theirmaintenance.
How great is the difference between the lot of the Manchester mechanic, and that of the Swiss commoner. The one lives inan atmosphere thick with smoke, with a dirty garret in an unhealthy lane as his only lodging, and the gin palace as his onlydistraction. The other, breathing the pure air of the splendid Linth valley, at the foot of the pure snows of the Glarnisch, issubject to the healthy influence of magnificent natural surroundings. He is well lodged; is the cultivator of his own field,which he holds by virtue of his natural add inalienable right of property; he grows a part of his food supply; and is attachedto the soil which he occupies, to the commune in whose administration he takes part, and to the canton whose laws hemakes directly in the general assembly of the Landesgemeinde , feeling himself connected with his fellow-members by thebonds of a common ownership, and to his fellow-citizens by the common exercise of the same rights.
The gloomy condition of the English workman begets in his mind hatred of social order, of his master and of capital; andconsequently a spirit of revolt. The Swiss workman, enjoying all the rights natural to man, cannot rise up against a systemwhich secures him real advantages, and which his vote helps to perpetuate. With him the fair motto of the French revolution,liberty, equality, fraternity, is no empty formula inscribed on the tablets of public documents. His liberty is complete, and hasbeen handed down from remote antiquity; equality is a fact sanctioned by all his laws; fraternity is not mere sentiment; it isembodied in institutions, which make the inhabitants of the same commune members of one family, partaking, by equal right,in the hereditary patrimony.
