Switzerland has swarmed for a century with conspirators of all hues and
nations; but the Swiss--thanks again to free institutions--have been
steel against revolution. The "Young Germanys" and "Young Italys" whom
she sheltered in the past sought only, it is true, to win for their own
countries the political freedom which Switzerland already enjoyed; but
the socialist and anarchist refugees of the last twenty years have had
social principles to preach which were as new and as good for the Swiss
as for their own countrymen; and, speaking as they did the languages of
the Confederation, they have never ceased making active efforts for the
conversion of the Swiss. The old Jurassian Federation of the
International, still continues to exist in French-speaking Switzerland,
and to bear witness for the extremest kind of anarchist communism--no
force or authority whatever, and a collective consumption of products as
well as a collective production; but this body is not increasing, and
though Guesde, the French socialist, made a lecturing tour through that
division of Switzerland in 1885, he had quite as little success for his
branch of the revolutionary cause. There are numbers of Social
Democratic Clubs in the German-speaking cantons, but they consist mainly
of German refugees, and contain few native Swiss members. After the
Anti-Socialist Laws of 1879, the German socialists settled largely in
Switzerland. They transferred to Zurich their party organ, the _Social
Democrat_, and along with it, to use their own phrase, the entire
Olympus of the party, the body of writers and managers who moved the
shuttle of its operations. These propagandists naturally did not neglect
the country of their adoption, but used every opportunity to forward
their agitation by addresses and even by extended missionary journeys,
and a separate Swiss Social Democratic party was actually founded, with
a separate organ, the _Arbeiterstimme_; but it collapsed in 1884 from
internal dissensions. No attempt was made to revive it till 1888, when
the action of the Federal Council in May against the foreign socialists
resident in the Confederation led to the organization of a Swiss
socialist party in October. The Federal Government had already, in 1884
and 1885, taken measures against the political refugees, especially the
anarchists, who were thought to have abused the hospitality they
received by planning and preparing in Switzerland the series of crimes
which shocked all Europe in 1884, and even by trying to explode the
Federal Palace at Berne itself. The Government instituted an inquiry,
and finding the country absolutely riddled with anarchist clubs,
determined to keep the eye of the police on them, and in the meantime
expelled thirty or forty of their leading members from Switzerland
altogether. These were almost without exception either Austrians or
Germans, and included Neve, now a leading anarchist in London. The
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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