Attached alike to liberty and to arms, the Swiss are no less famous for their undaunted intrepidity than their simple and pure democracy. From early times the hardy mountaineers of the Alps were eminently and splendidly martial. History is full of their steadiness and bravery on the field of battle. When Rome was in its highest military glory, its armies under the Consul Lucius Cassius were routed by the Helvetians on the shores of Lake Leman, 111 B.C. The two armies are supposed to have met about where the Rhone falls into the lake, and the conquerors of all Italy, the masters of Greece and Macedonia, who had carried their victorious armies over Asia and Africa, were overcome by a people hitherto unknown. Julius Cæsar speaks of their “military virtue and constant warfare with the Germans.” Livy and Tacitus refer to them as a people originally of the Gallic nation, “renowned for their valor and their exploits in war.” About the middle of the fourteenth century attention began to be attracted towards these mountaineers, and great was the wonder that cavalry, which made the only effective part of the federal armies of those ages, should be routed by men on foot; that warriors sheathed in complete steel should be overpowered by naked peasants who wore no defensive armor, and were irregularly provided with pikes, halberds, and clubs, for the purposes of attack; above all, it seemed a species of miracle that knights and nobles of the highest birth should be defeated by mountaineers and shepherds. The repeated victories of the Swiss over troops having on their side numbers and discipline, and the advantage of the most perfect military equipment then known and confided in, plainly intimated that a new principle of civil organization as well as of military movements had arisen amid the stormy regions of Helvetia. The signal victory over Charles the Bold of Burgundy, in which they routed the celebrated Burgundian _ordonnance_, constituting the finest body of chivalry of Europe, demonstrated their capacity as infantry. This, no doubt, contributed to the formation of that invincible Spanish infantry which, under the Great Captain and his successors, may be said to have decided the fate of Europe for more than half a century. The “Swiss whiskered Infantry” became distinguished in all the continental wars by pre-eminent valor and discipline. Their principal weapon was a pike about eighteen feet long; and, forming in solid battalions, which, bristling with spears all around, received the technical appellation of the _hedgehog_, they presented an invulnerable front on every quarter, and received unshaken the most desperate charges of the steel-clad cavalry on their terrible array of pikes. In the Granadine war (1484), among the volunteers that flocked to the Spanish camp was a corps of Swiss infantry, who are thus simply described by Pulgar: “There joined the royal standard a body of men from Switzerland, a country in upper Germany; these men were bold