f Vienna had arranged for the admission to the
confederacy of the three allied districts of Valais, Geneva, and
Neuchatel, there was worked out, by the Swiss themselves, a
constitution known as the "Federal Pact," which was formally approved
by the twenty-two cantons at Zuerich, August 7, 1815.[585]

[Footnote 585: This statement needs to be qualified
by the observation that the half-canton Nidwalden
approved the constitution August 30, and only when
compelled by force to do so.]

By this instrument the ties which bound the federation together were
still further relaxed. The cantons regained almost the measure of
independence which they had possessed prior to the French
intervention. The Diet was maintained, on the basis now of one vote
for each canton, regardless of size or population.[586] It possessed
some powers,--for example, that of declaring war or peace, with the
consent of three-fourths of the cantons,--but there were virtually no
means by which the body could enforce the decrees which it enacted.
The executive authority of the Confederation was vested in the
governments of the three cantons of Zuerich, Lucerne, and Bern, which,
it was stipulated, should serve in rotation, each during a period of
two years. Practically all of the guarantees of common citizenship,
religious toleration, and individual liberty which the French had
introduced were rescinded, and during the decade following 1815 the
trend in most of the more important cantons was not only particularistic
but also distinctly reactionary. The smaller and poorer ones (p. 409)
retained largely their democratic institutions, especially their
Landesgemeinden, or primary assemblies, but it was only after 1830,
and in some measure under the stimulus of the revolutionary movements
of that year, that the majority of the cantonal governments underwent
that regeneration in respect to the suffrage and the status of the
individual which lay behind the transforming movements of 1848.[587]

[Footnote 586: Three of the cantons--Unterwalden,
Basel, and Appenzell--were divided into
half-cantons, each with a government of its own;
but each possessed only half a vote in the Diet.]

[Footnote 587: B. Van Muyden, La suisse sous le
pacte de 1815, 2 vols. (Lausanne and Paris,