Excerpt from A Sovereign People: A Study of Swiss Democracy Although it has been my endeavour to follow out as far as possible the chief threads of interest indicated in the note-books, the universality of his sympathy with all movements of social betterment led him in his conversation or his reading to touch many themes which he had not time or opportunity to elabo rate. At certain places indeed his plan of study radiated into an intricacy of design which a whole lifetime would hardly have sufficed to execute, as the vast collection of pamphlets and official documents relating to the minutiae of cantonal and municipal politics serves to illustrate. Had he lived to carry through his work, he would doubtless have exercised here that fine quality of judgment in selection which he has exhibited in his other books. Many of these minor points which, breaking in upon his main investigations, find a record in the notes I have been compelled to ignore. But, with one exception, I have tried to develop and express what he regarded as the chief lessons which Swiss democracy had to teach the world at large and his own countrymen in par ticular. This exception is the banking system in the cantons and the larger cities. Mr. Lloyd's inquiries into this impor tant subject made it evident that he intended to devote some space to Swiss finance when he came to write his book. But he had not had time to go far enough into this intricately tech nical subject to indicate clearly the path of exposition he would follow, and I deemed it safer and fairer to omit an attempt at interpretation in which there would have been considerable danger of misrepresenting his views. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.