1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 263 shows that the actual treachery was due to a very small number of indi- viduals, and devotes a long appendix to the documentary proofs. The shock to national pride and the reaction against the French alliance led to projects of reform in the pension system, and of a con- sequent tightening of the federal tie, which make the years from 1500 to 1504 a period of especial interest in Swiss internal history. The diet of Baden in 1503 reached an agreement which might well have been a turn- ing-point in federal history. The twelve cantons with Appenzell and the town of St. Gall passed a resolution against the receipt of foreign pensions, pay, or presents, and against any levy of troops without the general consent. The provision that any transgressor of the ordinance should be punished, whether found in his own canton or any other, is a detail pointing towards the development of a really national state. In Zurich territory pensions were denounced from the pulpit, as afterwards by Zwingli. But French gold was again a dissolvent force, aided by funda- mental differences in foreign policy. While Bern was distinctly pro- imperial, Solothurn was the seat of a French resident, and her magnates acted as French informers. Zurich, which had held the extremist views against pensions, refused to seal a document binding a minority on the constitutional ground that it was opposed to her original compact on entering the confederacy. Even at Bern, which had done its utmost against unlicensed levies, and had been genuinely opposed to French policy and corruption, influential citizens were in 1505 accepting French bribes. Keform was probably an economic impossibility. Not only the military classes, upper and lower, but the civil members of the state governments lived on pay and pensions, and the cantons themselves could not meet their own expenses without foreign subsidies. It was in vain to reiterate that in a few years 30,000 Swiss had been lost in French service ; in 1503-4 6,000 Swiss streamed out towards Naples, of whom only 1,500 returned. From the loss of her manhood and the inevitable agricultural and industrial decline, Switzerland had become wholly dependent on foreign money and supplies. In these same years the Swiss made the one important territorial acquisition effected since that of the Thurgau in 1460. The forest cantons, and of them especially Uri, were bent upon extorting from Louis XII the fulfilment of his promise to cede Bellinzona. In 1500 Uri and Schwyz seized Bellinzona, and in 1501 Lugano was surprised, and held for nearly a year. This aggressive policy met with no approval from the other cantons, a few of which were pro-French, and the rest not interested in this southern expansion, which disturbed the trade of the St. Gothard, indis- pensable to most of them. Yet the obstinacy of the men of Uri had its reward, aided as they were by the unpopularity of the French in Milan and their misfortunes in Naples. The forest cantons first came to an agreement, and then prevailed upon the others to join in an attack upon Locarno. The allied confederacies of Grisons and the Valais eagerly gave support ; the Venetians were urged to supply men and money to expel the French from Lombardy. Here at last was a national war, and Louis XII, in fear of an attack on Lombardy from north and east, ceded Bellinzona by the treaty of Arona in April 1503. This was a notable success. The
