ties. They were practicing it at the stately city of Berne when we
visited it; they were practicing it at various other places as we passed.
Every town is provided with a public shooting-ground near its gates.

It was at one of the most remarkable of these towns; it was at Freiburg,
Catholic Freiburg, full of Catholic seminaries and convents, in the
churches of which you may hear the shrill voices of the nuns chanting
matins, themselves unseen; it was at Freiburg, grandly seated on the
craggy banks of her rivers, flowing in deep gulfs, spanned by the loftiest
and longest chain-bridges in the world, that I saw another evidence of
the fact that Switzerland is the only place on the continent where freedom
is understood, or allowed to have an existence. A proclamation of the
authorities of the canton was pasted on the walls and gates, ordaining the
16th of September as a day of religious thanksgiving. After recounting the
motives of gratitude to Providence; after speaking of the abundance of the
harvests, the health enjoyed throughout Switzerland, at the threshold of
which the cholera had a second time been stayed; the subsidence of
political animosities, and the quiet enjoyment of the benefits of the new
constitution upon which the country had entered, the proclamation
mentioned, as a special reason of gratitude to Almighty God, that
Switzerland, in this day of revolutions, had been enabled to offer, among
her mountains, a safe and unmolested asylum to the thousands of fugitives
who had suffered defeat in the battles of freedom.

I could not help contrasting this with the cruel treatment shown by France
to the political refugees from Baden and other parts of Germany. A few
days before, it had been announced that the French government required of
these poor fellows that they should either enlist at once in the regiments
destined for service in Algiers, or immediately leave the
country--offering them the alternative of military slavery, or banishment
from the country in which they had hoped to find a shelter.

I have spoken of the practice of Switzerland in regard to passports, an
example which it does not suit the purpose the French politicians to
follow. Here, and all over the continent, the passport system is as
strictly and vexatiously enforced as ever. It is remarkable that none of
the reformers occupied in the late remodelling of European institutions,
seems to have thought of abolishing this invention of despotism--th