Schutzzollagitation – Neapolitanische Werbungen

** Berne, 12 January. The protective tariff agitation in Switzerland is becoming increasingly lively, and in the same proportion also the movement in the interest of retaining the existing free trade system. The arguments on both sides are equally excellent, and so far it is difficult to foresee how Switzerland will extricate herself from the dilemma. The protective tariff party points to the annually increasing pressure of foreign competition on domestic industry and to the prospect, vanishing in equal measure, of employing the growing breadless population. The free traders, on the other hand, set against this the rise in the price of manufactured goods for the agricultural majority of the people, and the impossibility for a nation of 2 millions of protecting a frontier as extensive and as well suited to smuggling as the Swiss frontier without ruinous expenditure. Both parties are perfectly right: without protective tariffs, one branch of Swiss industry after another is ruined; with protective tariffs, the federal finances are ruined. In order to combine the two, the Berne Verfassungsfreund proposes a juste-milieu tariff, which would ruin both together. The federal chambers may break their teeth on the impossible solution of this question in March.

In Geneva, Neapolitan recruiting officers have recently been showing themselves, in order to drum up recruits for the service of His Bombarding Majesty. Ferdinand must be in dire need of the sturdy Swiss, for he is having recruiting carried on even in cantons with whom he has concluded no capitulation. But the Geneva government soon put a stop to this business. It declared all engagements already concluded to be null and void, prohibited all recruiting, and threatened the recruiting officers with severe punishment. The mercenaries of the Neapolitan hyena thereupon withdrew forthwith from the territory of Geneva.

Müller – The Fribourg Government – Ochsenbein

** Berne, 13 January. The great Herr Tobias Müller has at last arrived in Canton Uri, and demands of the government that the depot for the Neapolitan recruits, which was previously in Genoa, be now transferred to Altorf, from which place he will then forward them to Naples by one route or another. It is not known whether the government will grant his request; but even if it does, it is still questionable whether the other capitulation governments will be satisfied with this transfer. – A troop of Lucerne recruits is now, as rumour has it, to be shipped to Naples via Trieste after all, to the scandal of the entire civilised world. –

The Fribourg government, which generally allows itself to be guilty of peculiar acts of arbitrariness, has once again, despite the new federal constitution, expelled a citizen of the Canton of Schwyz by police order. Earlier it had equally unceremoniously expelled Herr Sieber of Zurich, editor of the “Wächter” of Murten and now co-editor of the Berne Zeitung. Both cases will come before the Federal Assembly, which it is to be hoped will know how to give effect to the constitution.

A miracle has come to pass: the organ of the neutral Herr Ochsenbein, the “Verfassungsfreund”, contritely acknowledges that the Ticinese were, after all, not so absolutely in the wrong in their quarrels with Radetzky and the eastern Swiss troops. It stammers its pater peccavi, and seeks to hush the matter up with an: Iliacos intra peccatur muros et extra. And yet the Ticinese councillors are the most out-and-out opponents of neutrality to be found, and adherents of what Ochsenbein, with odious appeal to Swiss national narrow-mindedness, has dubbed “foreign politics”. But the Ticinese have become very popular in Berne through the reports of the Berne troops, and Herr Ochsenbein must remain popular in Berne, and finally – this is the heart of the matter – the Federal Council, without the slightest provocation, has again made the Canton of Ticino responsible for all further complications with Radetzky. Every time, however, that Herr Ochsenbein puts through a piece of practical baseness in the Federal Council, the Verfassungsfreund has to strike a magnanimous and noble tone in theory. That is how the stupid peasants are governed in this country. O democracy!