298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to reckon with the foreigner as a foe, a forlorn vagabond, whom 

 it is his native-born privilege to spoil. The blood of his ancestor, 

 the brigand, courses in his veins, and his first impulse is to plun- 

 der the wayfarer. Prudence and the police may curb this pro- 

 genital, predatorial proclivity ; but the self-restraint always costs 

 an effort, and, as a compromise with his instinctive feelings, in- 

 stead of relieving the guest of his purse by force, he robs him of 

 an undue portion of its contents by adding two or three hundred 

 per cent to the usual price of fare and lodgment. 



In many cantons of Switzerland, and especially in the Bernese 

 highlands, we have the spectacle of a whole people apparently 

 born and bred to consider mountain passes, romantic valleys, gla- 

 ciers, and waterfalls as so many traps for curious and unwary 

 tourists, and to prize sublime scenery merely as a ready-made snare 

 to catch coots, dupes, gulls, boobies, and other varieties of too con- 

 fiding summer birds of passage, which the categorizing mind of 

 the German has reduced to two essentially distinct but closely 

 connected classes, Bergfexen and Sommerfrischler. 



This clannish spirit even invades and desecrates the courts of 

 justice, and the Helvetian Themis is especially notorious for her 

 propensity to blink the legal rights of the case and to tip the bal- 

 ance in favor of her cantonal or federal compatriots as opposed to 

 the stranger within her gates. 



In France the droit d'aubaine OTJUS albinagii confiscated to 

 the crown the property of all aliens who died within the limits of 

 the realm, to the exclusion of the natural heirs, unless these hap- 

 pened to be the king's subjects. This barbarous law was abolished 

 by a decree of the National Assembly on the 6th of August, 1790, 

 but was re-enacted twelve years later and incorporated in the 

 Code Napoleon, modified, however, by a clause making the testa- 

 mentary capacity of aliens dependent upon reciprocity ; in other 

 words, it was stipulated that the will of a foreigner should be 

 declared valid in France, provided the laws of the said foreigner's 

 country placed on the same footing the will of a Frenchman de- 

 ceased within its jurisdiction. On the 14th of July, 1819, the 

 droit d'aubaine was finally abrogated throughout the entire 

 kingdom, after having been already considerably mitigated and 

 partially annulled by the municipal authorities of Lyons and 

 other industrial and commercial cities, which found this relic of 

 mediaeval legislation a serious obstruction to foreign trade. 



Akin to this system of right was the German Wildfangsrecht 

 or jus wildfangiatus, also known as jus kolbekerlii, which, as the 

 term implies, accorded to human beings the privilege which game 

 laws guarantee to the quarry, namely, that of being legally hunted. 

 Kolbenrecht is equivalent to club law. An old and often quoted 

 proverb, Kolbengericht und Faustrecht ward nie schlecht the 



