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262 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April given its sanction to the superstition that democracy is the pathway to peace. If there was a natural dualism between the rural cantons and the cities, the latter themselves never had the same policy or the same geo- graphical interests. Bern looked west, Zurich north and east, Lucerne generally south. After the death of Niklas Diesbach and the close of the Burgundian war, Bern was anti-French, because a stronger France thwarted her progress westwards. Lucerne and Solothurn were the only towns upon which France could usually rely. Zurich, a more or less normal German city, and always somewhat loosely attached to the confederacy, leant towards the emperor. The forest cantons, and more especially Uri, never took their eyes off Bellinzona and the Italian lakes, a constant menace to any ruler of Milan. Thus in the confederacy, which was brought face to face with half a century of foreign wars, there was no common policy and few common interests, no adequate control by the cantonal governments, and still less by the federal constitution. The Italian wars illustrate almost yearly the futility of the constant diets, which could rarely reach an agreement, and never enforce its provisions. In spite of class and cantonal disunion and a chronic lack of discipline, there was among the governing bodies a feeling of national patriotism and a sensitiveness for the national prestige. That Swiss should fight against each other for foreign pay was especially repugnant to their better feelings. In the campaigns of Charles VIII and Louis XII against Naples the situation was simple ; levies were permitted by virtue of earlier capitula- tions and the recent treaty of 1499, though the numbers might be much in excess of the stipulated quota. In the former case it is true that the blockade of Louis of Orleans in Novara provoked a flood of pro-French enthusiasm among the military classes which overwhelmed the restrictive measures of their governments and was embarrassing to that of Charles VIII. This, too, was stimulated in the forest cantons by the promise of Orleans to cede Bellinzona, Locarno, Lugano, and Arona in the event of his release. But even then, among the Venetian and imperial forces arrayed against him, levies from Switzerland or the associated leagues of the Valais and the Grisons were in evidence. This fratricidal warfare, however, reached its climax in Louis XII's conquest of Milan and the capture of Ludovico Moro by the complicity of his own mercenaries. At first popular feeling was so strongly in favour of the French king that the governments of Bern and Zurich had to bend to it. This was at the crisis of the Suabian war, a really national struggle, and Ludovico's close relationship to the emperor made him a national enemy, added to which was the professional jealousy between Swiss and landsknechts. But when peace was made with the emperor, when the easy conquest of Lombardy had alarmed the more responsible governments, and had made even the democratic forest cantons doubt the fulfilment of French promises as to the lacustrine cessions, the situation altered. Ludovico returned with aid from Swiss and Grisons, who drove their brethren from Milan. The final incident of the second siege of Novara, when besiegers and besieged were mainly Swiss, and the betrayal of Ludovico gave a shock to the Swiss conscience from which it never entirely recovered. The author admits this, but he