Swiss-Italian

** Bern, December 28.

No sooner are the Swiss troops withdrawn from the Lombard border than Radetzky’s vexations begin anew. He writes to the federal representatives in Ticino that a disturbing arms traffic is taking place on the border, and the federal representatives persuade the Ticino government to consent to several house searches in Mendrisio. A few muskets were found and confiscated. How they intend to justify this violation of domiciliary rights and seizure of foreign property is impossible to see. The only wonder is that the Ticino government lent itself to it.

The Neapolitan recruitment in Lucerne and the original cantons now seems to be leading to nothing after all. Not that a sufficient number of honest sons of the Alps were not found willing to sell their hide for ready money and do Croatian service in Ferdinand’s pay; on the contrary! But the matter founders on the impossibility of getting from Switzerland to Naples.

According to the capitulation, the recruits must be conveyed via Genoa, and the Turin government refused them passage. It is now said that the recruits are to be taken to Trieste and embarked there. This news caused great terror among those enrolled. They do not want to go to Austria. They fear being thrown among the genuine Croats and led against the Magyars, and are now petitioning the Lucerne government council to insist on the Genoa route. Curious. As if it could not be a matter of indifference to these lifeguards of the counter-revolution whether they massacre Magyars or Messinese! But of course, Austrian paper twenty-kreuzer notes and Neapolitan full-weight ducats – that is a difference!

Incidentally, the Lucerne government seems to be following the Berne government and intends to suspend the capitulation until the Swiss merchants in Naples and Messina have been indemnified. At least it has enquired of the Federal Council how the indemnification matter stands. That would leave only the original cantons, and these will not, as long as the federal constitution permits – that is, as long as the current capitulations have still to run – allow themselves to be deprived of the right of every citizen to sell himself. This right of self-sale is one of the finest and oldest privileges of the free original Swiss, and when these brave “first-born of freedom” sought to protect “their five-hundred-year-old rights” against the new federal constitution, it was above all this special right they were aiming at, the one the new federal constitution abolishes. The military capitulations are truly a vital question for the original cantons. For five hundred years they have been the drainage channel for the surplus population, and hence the best guarantee of the existing barbaric conditions. Abolish the capitulations, and you will bring about a veritable revolution in these so-called “pure” – i.e. in practice highly unsavoury – democracies.

The younger sons of the peasants, who now go to Naples and Rome, will have to stay at home; they will find no occupation, either in their own cantons or in the rest of Switzerland, which already labours sufficiently under a surplus of “supernumeraries”; they will form a new class of peasant-proletarians, which by its mere existence must throw into the greatest confusion all the old relations of property, acquisition, and law of these herdsmen tribes, based on thousand-year-old custom. Where are these sterile mountain countries to find the means to feed the paupers who are being deported to their borders from all sides? Already the nucleus of such a class of paupers exists, and threatens the inherited patriarchalism in a most unpleasant manner. Therefore, even if – which is not to be expected – in the next few years the European revolution should show the same respect for Swiss neutrality as hitherto, a revolutionary ferment is nevertheless being prepared by the article of the new federal constitution: military capitulations are prohibited – a ferment that would finally overturn from top to bottom the oldest and most stubborn seats of reactionary barbarism in Europe. Just as the monarchies, so also the reactionary republics perish from pecuniary consumption, from the “pale melancholy of financial distress.”