The federal compact was also a compromise between the old and the new.  The nineteen cantons were to enjoy sovereign powers under the shelter of the old federal pact.  Bonaparte saw that the fussy imposition of French governmental forms in 1798 had wrought infinite harm, and he now granted to the federal authorities merely the powers necessary for self-defence:  the federal forces were to consist of 15,200 men—­a number less than that which by old treaty Switzerland had to furnish to France.  The central power was vested in a Landamman and other officers appointed yearly by one of the six chief cantons taken in rotation; and a Federal Diet, consisting of twenty-five deputies—­one from each of the small cantons, and two from each of the six larger cantons—­met to discuss matters of general import, but the balance of power rested with the cantons:  further articles regulated the Helvetic debt and declared the independence of Switzerland—­as if a land could be independent which furnished more troops to the foreigner than it was allowed to maintain for its own defence.  Furthermore, the Act breathed not a word about religious liberty, freedom of the Press, or the right of petition:  and, viewing it as a whole, the friends of freedom had cause to echo the complaint of Stapfer that “the First Consul’s aim was to annul Switzerland politically, but to assure to the Swiss the greatest possible domestic happiness.”

I have judged it advisable to give an account of Franco-Swiss relations on a scale proportionate to their interest and importance; they exhibit, not only the meanness and folly of the French Directory, but the genius of the great Corsican in skilfully blending the new and the old, and in his rejection of the fussy pedantry of French theorists and the worst prejudices of the Swiss oligarchs.  Had not his sage designs been intertwined with subtle intrigues which assured his own unquestioned supremacy in that land, the Act of Mediation might be reckoned among the grandest and most beneficent achievements.  As it is, it must be regarded as a masterpiece of able but selfish statecraft, which contrasts unfavourably with the disinterested arrangements sanctioned by the allies for Switzerland in 1815.

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CHAPTER XVII

THE RENEWAL OF WAR

The re-occupation of Switzerland by the French in October, 1802, was soon followed by other serious events, which convinced the British Ministry that war was hardly to be avoided.  Indeed, before the treaty was ratified, ominous complaints had begun to pass between Paris and London.