Protective Tariff Agitation – Neapolitan Recruiting

Friedrich Engels (1849-01-17)

*Neue Rheinische Zeitung* No. 197, January 17, 1849

** Berne, January 12. The protective tariff agitation in Switzerland is becoming more and more lively, and in the same proportion so is the movement in favour of retaining the free trade system that has existed hitherto. The arguments on both sides are equally excellent, and so far it is difficult to foresee how Switzerland will extricate itself from the dilemma. The protective tariff party points to the annually increasing pressure of foreign competition on domestic industry and to the prospect, vanishing at the same rate, of employing the growing breadless population. The free traders, for their part, point to the increased cost of industrial products for the farming majority of the people, and to the impossibility, for a people of 2 millions, of protecting a frontier as extensive and as suited to smuggling as the Swiss one without ruinous expenditure. Both parties are completely 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 both, the Berne *Verfassungsfreund* proposes a *juste-milieu* tariff, which would ruin both together. The federal councils may break their teeth on the impossible solution of this question in March.

In Geneva, Neapolitan recruiting officers have been seen for some time past, trying to drum up recruits for the service of His Bombarding Majesty. Ferdinand must be in dire need of the sturdy Swiss, since he has recruiting carried out even in cantons with which he has concluded no capitulation. But the Geneva government soon put a stop to this activity. It declared all engagements already concluded null and void, prohibited all recruiting, and threatened the recruiting officers with severe punishment. The mercenaries of the Neapolitan hyena thereupon promptly withdrew from Geneva territory.

Müller – The Fribourg Government – Ochsenbein

Friedrich Engels (1849-01-17)

*Neue Rheinische Zeitung* No. 197, January 17, 1849

** Berne, January 13. The great Herr Tobias Müller has at last arrived in the canton of Uri and demands of the government that the depot for the Neapolitan recruits, which was formerly in Genoa, now be transferred to Altdorf, whence 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, after all, to be transported to Naples via Trieste, so it is said, to the scandal of the entire civilised world. –

The Fribourg government, which allows itself strange arbitrary acts anyway, has now once again, in defiance of the new federal constitution, expelled a citizen of the canton of Schwyz by police order. Earlier, it had with equal nonchalance expelled Herr Sieber of Zurich, editor of the *Wächter* of Murten and now co-editor of the *Berner Zeitung*. Both cases will come before the Federal Assembly, which will, it is hoped, know how to enforce the constitution.

A miracle has happened: The organ of the neutral Herr Ochsenbein, the *Verfassungsfreund*, contritely acknowledges that the Ticinese, in their quarrels with Radetzky and the eastern Swiss troops, were not so very much in the wrong after all. It stammers its *pater peccavi* and tries to hush the matter up with an: *Iliacos intra peccatur muros et extra*. And yet the Ticinese members of the government are the most out-and-out enemies of neutrality there are, and supporters of what Ochsenbein, with spiteful appeals to Swiss national narrow-mindedness, calls “foreign policy”. 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, that is the heart of the matter, the Federal Council, without any provocation, has once more made the canton of Ticino responsible for all further entanglements with Radetzky. But every time Herr Ochsenbein pushes through a piece of practical baseness in the Federal Council, the *Verfassungsfreund* has to put on a magnanimous and noble show in theory. That is how the stupid peasants are ruled here in this country. O democracy!