LAWS OF THE VALAIS. 187 scribed in the Index of the Romish Congregation, such as the books of Guizot, Cousin, Dupin, Jouffroy, Thierry, in a word, whatever work may have been published in France for half a century except the nauseous productions of the Jesuitical school. Well! the bare fact of having kept these volumes constitutes a crime, unless the authorization of the Company of Ignatius shall have been obtained, a thing which cannot be, except for its most devoted creatures. Certainly, this is new, original, unheard of. We have heard of certain ordnances of our ancient kings punishing the readers of a bad book, after having condemned the author; but we never heard of a law pronouncing a universal sentence against the proprietors and keepers of works contrary to the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Romish religion. But how can the law be executed? Will they make domi ciliary visits, to examine, one after another, the books belonging to each individual? Will they ferret for them in the secret corners of the household, in order to be sure that the proscribed writings are not shut up in some hiding-place? When a poor inhabitant of the Canton comes under the suspicions of the Clergy because he has not regularly kept the fasts, or taken his note of confession at canonical times, will they break upon his bureaus, his furniture, to discover the unhappy volumes, which have inspired him with such infidelity? We should not be at all surprised at this. Where there is a will, there is a way. If they would not shrink from publishing such a monstrous law, neither will they quail before the measure necessary to carry it into execution. It will be a permanent inquisition, which will always possess the means of oppressing and breaking down those who will not humbly bow beneath its yoke of bondage. Talk to us after this of the generous principles of the Jesuits and the Romish Priests! Tell us, ye propagandists of the Romish faith, your love of liberty! Tell us for the millionth time that you, and you only, know how to respect the rights of the people and the progress of humanity! Pretend your loving democracy in your sermons and your journals! Go to, we know you of old, and soon there will not be a reasonable man in the world who will not discover under your mask the deep imprints of your insatiable instinct of tyranny! If there were the least particle of sincerity in your liberal maxims and pretences, you would at least express your indignation against such monstrous laws promulgated in the Canton du Valais; you would attack these abominable enterprises of the Jesuits; but what one of your journals is there, that would have the frankness and sincerity to do this? Every Ecclesiastical Gazette is silent, and yet to-morrow these same despotic journals will dare tell their adversaries that they are the enemies of liberty. Comedians, comedians! the execrable farce you are playing will have to be finished, and then beware of the conclusion! This is an energetic strain of criticism, appeal, and invective, before which, if there be much of it, such detestable measures cannot stand. The Jesuits are the Mamelukes of the Romish Church; neither king nor people can be independent or free where such a body of tyrants, the worse for being secret, bear sway. Note the expression directly or indirectly in the law against writings and propositions tending to bring into disrepute the Holy Romish religion of State. What traps and caverns of tyranny are here! What room for more than inquisitorial acuteness and cruelty, in searching out and detecting the indirect tendencies of publications, which the Priests. see fit to proscribe. The most innocent writing may thus be made the ground of a severe imprisonment; and as to all investigation or discussion of the truth, it becomes impossible. But we have more pleasant footsteps to follow than those of the Jesuits; so farewell to their trail for the present. We shall meet them again in Switzerland. CHAPTER XXIX. PHYSICAL PLAGUES OF THE CANTON DU VALAIS AND OF SWITZERLAND.-HOSPITAL FOR THE CRETINS. APPROACHING Sion from Martigny the view is exceedingly pic turesque and romantic, by reason of several extensive old cas tles on successive craggy peaks, that rise in commanding grandeur, like the Acropolis at Athens, and seem, as you advance PLAGUE OF CRETINISM. 189 upwards, to fill the whole valley. One of the highest summits is crowned with a church or convent, a most imposing object, seen against the sky long before you arrive at the base of the village. The view from this church in every direction, or from the crags on which it is perched, is so extensive, so rich, and so picturesque, as abundantly to recompense even a tired traveller for the toil of the ascent. Besides, there is on this hill an exceedingly aged old rocky edifice of worship, that looks. as if it might have existed before the Roman Catholic Church itself began to have a being. Of the village below, wooden shoes and woollen stockings seemed to be the staple commodity, while a knot of industrious women, washing clothes around the fountain in the centre of the street, were, when we passed, the most striking object in view. Age, disease, uncleanly cottages, hard labour, penury, scanty and unwholesome food, will transform beauty into ugliness, anywhere in the world, even under the most delicious climate. What a change! Could any being, unacquainted with the progress of our race from elastic youth to that colourless, toothless time, when the grasshopper is a burden, believe that these forms, which seem now a company of the personified genii of wrinkles, were once as fair as the Virgin Mother of their invocations? They may have been. Youth itself is beauty, and the most secret, black, and midnight hags were once young. But Shakspere need not have gone upon the Continent, nor Wordsworth among the fish-women of Calais, to find good types of witches. I think I have seen in Edinburgh as fair examples of tough, old, furrowed ugliness, as in Switzerland, or Turkey, or Italy, or Spain, or Egypt. Old age is beautiful, when gentleness goes with it, and it has filial tenderness and care to lean upon; the Christian's hope within, and the reverential fond pride and honour of gray hairs in the household, make up a picture almost as beautiful as that of a babe in the cradle, or a girl at play. But where, from infancy to threescore years and ten, there are only the hardest, wrinkle-making realities of life, its tasks without its compensations, and its withering superstitions without its consolations, there can be nothing left of beauty; humanity stands like a blasted pine in the desert. "'Tis said, fantastic Ocean doth unfold To sink, and meet them in their fretted caves, Your attention in the Valley of the Rhone is painfully turned to the miserable cretins or idiots, and those unfortunate beings, whose necks are distended with the excrescences of the goitre, as if hung round with swollen bladders of flesh. The poor creatures so afflicted did always seem to me to have an exceeding weight of sadness in their countenances, though they went about labouring like others. These frightful diseases prevail among the population of the Valais to a greater extent than anywhere else in Switzerland. The number of inhabitants in Sion is about 2500. Poverty, disease, and filth mark the whole valley; and so long as the people are shut up to the superstitions of Romanism, so long they must remain shut out from the only consolations that could be some support amidst their miseries, and debarred from the only refining and eleva ting influences, that could soften and bless a condition so sad as theirs. Of the two physical plagues that infest the beautiful valleys of Switzerland, cretinism is by far the worst. It is the most repulsive and painful form of idiocy I have ever witnessed. It makes the human being look less intelligent than the brute, A hooting cry between a howl and a burst of laughter some times breaks from the staring and gibbering object before you, a creature that haunts the villages, you cannot say like a spectre, for these miserable beings seemed always in good flesh, but like the personification of the twin brother of madness, and far more fearful. It creates a solemn awe in the soul, to look upon one of these beings, in whom the mind does not seem so much deranged, as departed, gone utterly, not a gleam of the spirit left, the household dog looking incomparably more huIt is a dreadful sight. The cretin will sometimes hobble after you with open hand, grinning for charity, with a cha man. HOSPITAL FOR THE CRETINS. 191 otic laugh, like a gust of wind clattering through the hall of a ruined castle. In the midst of poverty this calamity is doubled, and none of its salient points of grim, disgusting misery can be concealed. The families and villages where it is developed are for the most part miserably poor. Filth, squalid corners for sleep, and im pure nourishment, help on the disease, like fuel for the plague. No moral causes are set in motion, no more than physical, to combat or hinder its progress, or ameliorate the condition of its victim; the family and the village bear the burden in silent hopeless despair, as a condemned criminal wears his chains, The only milder feature of the wretchedness that you can think of is this, that the poor cretin himself is not in pain, and is perfectly insensible to his condition. But perhaps you are asking if there are no benevolent efforts to remedy this great evil, no asylums or hospitals for the poor creatures so stricken. I know of only one, and that of recent establishment, though there was never a more suitable field for philanthropy to work in. The celebrated philosopher Saussure conceived that this disease of cretinism must be owing to a vicious atmosphere, wanting in some of the elements necessary to the healthful development of the human system. Meditating on this point, a philanthropic physician among the Oberland Alps not long since conceived the happy idea of combating this evil at its commencement, by taking the children in their infancy from the fearful influence darting upon them, and carrying them away to be nourished and strengthened by the pure air of the mountains. The name of this excellent man was Doctor Guggenbühl. He had been called one day to examine a case of some malignant disease, which for ages from time to time had ravaged the beautiful valleys of the higher Alps, when his attention was fixed by an old Cretin, who was idiotically blating a half-forgotten prayer before an image of the Virgin at Seedorf in the Canton Uri. How melancholy that the only religion learned by the poor idiot was that of an Ave Maria before a wooden image! But the sight deeply agitated the sensibilities of the physician on behalf of those unfortunate creatures, and, as he |