and the least cause to be discontented either with their country or themselves. And yet, of a sudden, up rises a storm; the Federation splits; and, before men can come to comprehend what the mountaineers are quarrelling about, swords are drawn, shots are fired, a couple of towns are captured, and the war is declared at an end almost before it was known to have commenced. It has been like a drama at the opera. _Scene_, a rocky district, with a town in the distance: enter a chorus of peasants, who sing about liberty. Alarums: a band of soldiers rush in and drive them off the stage. Grand cantata of the president,--and the curtain falls. Some connoisseurs in the boxes call for the manager, and ask when the opera is going to begin, as they wish to intervene: the manager enters from the side-door, bows humbly, and intimates that they may have their tickets returned if they please, the play being over. General disappointment! Something like this would be the dramatised history of the late Helvetic disturbances; so brief, and we may almost say so ridiculous, has the whole seemed. In most countries, when a civil war is proclaimed, and one-third of the nation declares its intention of separating from the other two-thirds, a struggle of some length and earnestness of purpose may be with tolerable certainty predicted: even in Belgium, we should suppose that a civil war would take a month or two before it could be finally extinguished. But in Switzerland it appears that the feelings of the belligerents, whatever may have been their previous intensity, have found an easy vent for rapid evaporation; and after one or two passes with the sword, the weaker combatant has dropped his point and given up. There must have been something false and spurious at the bottom of all this, or all the braggadocio of the Federalists and the Sonderbund could never have been dissipated by a few shots at Fribourg and Lucerne: one of the two parties at least could not have been in earnest, or they never would have knocked under so easily and so speedily. Political reasons for war cannot become on a sudden so thoroughly fallacious, nor military resources so thoroughly exhausted, as that one day's skirmishing at Fribourg, and two day's fighting near Lucerne, could suffice to settle the quarrel. We are inclined, therefore, to suspect the weaker party to have been conscious of wrong in this case, though to any impartial observer the acts of aggression lay all at the door of the stronger.