How stood the matter? The central cantons, strong in their mountain fastnesses, and on the borders of their sublime lakes, have maintained, under republican forms, the true aristocratic spirit, and the ancient religion of Switzerland. Those encircling these central states, the dwellers in the champaign country and in the cities, have gone into the follies of democracy, and have abandoned more or less the dignity of the old Swiss character, to ape the vices, political and social, of the neighbouring people, whether French or German. Ever since the factious burst of pseudo-patriotism, during the _in_glorious "Three days" of 1830, the inhabitants of the northern Swiss towns have had their heads running on the visionary schemes that have distracted Frenchmen's brains; and like daws in peacocks' feathers, or servants in their masters' cast-off clothes, have been trying to imitate the "virtues," political and social, of the Gallic people. Hence has arisen the Radical party in the larger cantons; hence has arisen the crowds of infidels and debauchees which have latterly disgraced the petty capitals of those cantons; hence the Catholics have been persecuted and robbed in Argau, and the respectable people of Geneva ousted out of the government by the rabble of that city. Hence came the outcry against the Jesuits, and the former quarrel with Lucerne, in which, however, that city came the best out of the struggle: hence an infinity of petty jealousies and heartburnings, and acts of oppression, on the part of the Radical majority against the Catholic minority, and hence finally the recent resort to arms. The Radical and the stronger cantons have considered it injurious to their own interests, and derogatory to their own dignity, that the freedom of opinion which they claim for themselves should exist in its full integrity among their Catholic and less powerful brethren. They have insisted on the abolition of certain religious orders of men within the limits of their territories; and, because the others have claimed the liberty guaranteed by the Federal compact, they have envenomed the quarrel so far, as to bring it to the decision of might rather than of right. It is in fact, however, a struggle of the democratic against the aristocratic party, of which the Catholic question is only a particular phase; the real bone of contention was, whether the Democrats or Radicals should be endangered in their predominance in the Diet, by the compact votes of the Aristocrats or Catholics. The expulsion of the Jesuits was only a very subordinate part of the question; and, as it now stands decided, the supremacy of the Radical and Democratic faction is firmly established.