The persistency of Switzerland upon this question in a policy so much at variance with all the liberal views of civilized nations, exhibiting a stubborn conservatism and irrational disinclination to change her laws to meet generally accepted principles and the requirements of her external relations, might well subject the Swiss to the characterization, applied at one time by Cobden to the English people, as “the Chinese of Europe.” All laws controlling States in their relations with one another are the slow result of growth, coming from an ever-increasing and ever-varying necessity; rendering any assumption of logical consistency not only impossible, but in many instances wrong, if not dangerous, to the inevitable concurrence of doctrines demanded by general usage and international amity. CHAPTER XI. LAND LAW AND TESTAMENTARY POWER. There can be no better security for the stability of the institutions of a country than by enlisting a large number of the people in their support, by giving them a stake in the prosperity of the soil. It is the highest public interest that landed property should easily get into those hands by which it can be turned to the best account; that the title to property in land should be sure and incontestable; and that there should be no legal obstacle to the subdivision of land, when the natural economy tends to it, so that the number of small land-owners shall not be artificially reduced by imperfection in the law. The larger the number of land-owners in a country, the more who have an interest in the soil they till, the more free and independent citizens there are interested in maintenance of public order. There is no ballast for a man like that of having a little earth, his own, about his feet. Cultivating his own field, growing a part of his food-supply, lodged under his own roof,--these make life pleasanter and labor lighter. The thoughts, feelings, lives of those who live under these conditions are of a higher order than the thoughts, the feelings, the lives of those who do not. Property is the essential complement of liberty. Without property man is not truly free. Whatever rights the political constitution may confer upon him, so long as he is a mere tenant he remains a dependent being; a free man politically, he is socially but a bondsman. There is no country in Europe where land possesses the great independence, and where there is so wide a distribution of land-ownership, as in Switzerland. The 5,378,122 acres devoted to agriculture are divided among 258,639 proprietors, the average size of the farms throughout the whole country being not more than twenty-one acres.[63] The facilities for the acquisition of land have produced small holders, with security of tenure, representing two-thirds of the entire population. There are no primogeniture, copyhold, customary tenures, and manorial rights, or other artificial obstacles to discourage land transfer and dispersion. No entails