The little war in Ticino was the expiring spasm of the ultramontanes, desperately struggling against the advance of the Liberals armed with the Referendum. The reactionaries were suppressed, and the people's law made to prevail. The story, now to be read in the annual reference books, is a chronicle that cannot fail to win approval for democracy as an agency of peace and justice. * * * * * The explanations conveyed in these facts imply yet a deeper cause for the lapses from freedom in question. This cause is that Switzerland, in many cantons for centuries undemocratic, is not yet entirely democratic. Law cannot rise higher than its source. The last step in democracy places all lawmaking power directly and fully in the hands of the majority, but if by the majority justice is dimly seen, justice will be imperfectly done. No more may be asserted for democracy than this: (1) That under the domination of force, at present the common state of mankind, escape from majority rule in some form is impossible. (2) That hence justice as seen by the majority, exercising its will in conditions of equality for all, marks the highest justice obtainable. In their social organization and practice, the Swiss have advanced the line of justice to where it registers their political,--their mental and moral,--development. Above that, manifestly, it cannot be carried. Despite a widespread impression to the contrary, the traditions for ages of nearly all that now constitutes Swiss territory have been of tyranny and not of liberty. In most of that territory, in turn, bishop, king, noble, oligarch, and politician governed, but until the past half century, or less, never the masses. Half the area of Switzerland, at present containing 40 per cent of the inhabitants, was brought into the federation only in the present century. Of this recent accession, Geneva, for a brief term part of France, had previously long been a pure oligarchy, and more remotely a dictatorship; Neuchatel had been a dependency of the crown of Prussia, never, in fact, fully released until 1857; Valais and the Grisons, so-called independent confederacies, had been under ecclesiastical rule; Ticino had for three centuries been governed as conquered territory, the privilege of ruling over it purchased by bailiffs from its conquerors, the ancient Swiss League--"a harsh government," declares the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "one of the darkest passages of Swiss history." Of the older Switzerland, Bale, Berne, and Zurich were oligarchical cities, each holding in feudality extensive neighboring regions. Not until 1833 were the peasants of Bale placed on an equal footing with the townspeople, and then only after serious disturbances. And the inequalities between lord and serf, victor and vanquished, voter and disfranchised, existed in all the older states save those now known as the Landsgemeinde cantons. Says Vincent: "Almost