ABSTRACT
Before the Confederation had had time to re-constitute itself, the triumphant Diet was assailed on every hand by the temptation to put its old ideals of freedom and the solidarity of the people into action by taking part in the general revolution. It is therefore of the greatest importance that the Diet, for all its elation, should have been able to preserve the strictest abstinence and, at this very moment, to lay down the lines of its future foreign policy. That policy was entirely directed towards neutrality and humaneness in the granting of asylum, which amounted, in actual fact, to non-intervention. It is a proof of how deeply the old political principle was rooted in the minds of the people that it emerged intact from the revolutionary storms of the spring of 1848. Realizing that the national existence depended on its maintenance, the radical leaders, for its sake, refrained from any attempt to put into action the ideas they had proclaimed not only in confidential conversation, but before the public. They made this sacrifice of their dearest wishes out of a deeper insight into the vital necessities of the country and an increased sense of responsibility to the union of states they administered. A cirular letter from Berne, the Vorort, to all the cantons expressed this statesmanlike view with the greatest emphasis.
