The democratical cantons, where the assembled population exercised the supreme power in their _landsgemeinde_, held the lowest station, in almost every respect, amongst the confederates. Narrowness of mind and ignorant hatred of all innovation withstood every proposal of improvement; while passion and prejudice, aided by the artifices of demagogues, often occasioned acts of crying injustice. Judicial proceedings were in the highest degree arbitrary; confession of crimes was extracted by torture, which, indeed, was often employed when nothing more remained to confess. Capital punishment, even for minor offences, was by no means rare. Public offices, particularly that of bailiff or land-vogt, were commonly conferred not on the worthiest but on the highest bidder; and the proceeds of this ignominious traffic went to the public treasury. Was it to be wondered at if these functionaries in their turn set justice up to auction in their bailiwicks, and endeavoured to recover their advances to the government by every sort of oppression of its subjects? [Sidenote: [1780 A.D.]] Mental cultivation was extremely neglected in these cantons, scientific establishments were rare, and those for education were, for the most part, in the hands of the capuchins; whose _esprit de corps_ was at least on one occasion beneficial, by preventing the admission of the jesuits into the canton of Schwytz in 1758. Elsewhere, however, similar influences produced worse effects. In Glarus, so late as 1780, an unfortunate servant girl was executed as a witch, on the charge of having lamed the leg of a child by magic, and having caused it to vomit pins. Credulous souls were even found to believe the affirmation that the girl had administered pin-seed through the medium of a magical cake, which had afterwards borne its fruit within the body of the child. The political relations of these cantons, in the period now before us, were of little importance. The constitutions of the aristocratical cantons had all of them this circumstance in common, that not only the capital towns assumed the rule of the whole canton, but the burghers of those towns themselves were divided into ruling and non-ruling families, of which the former monopolised admission to all places of honour. But the governments of these cantons deserve to be treated of more at length.