174 



REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



April 1, 1913. 



on an absurdity — that numbers, having ap- 

 peared, will immediately repeat themselves 

 several times in succession or close together; 

 29 and 36 are the Grand Duke's favourite 

 numbers. When one of these appears, he 

 bets the maximum (£640) that it will repeat, 

 staking also on chevaux and carrees, so that 

 if the number itself does not come, another 

 near it may still give him a limited success. 



THE CONQUEROR. 



Mr. Williamson does not pretend to 

 give a complete picture of the tragedies 

 which must be enacted daily in the arti- 

 ficial atmosphere of the gamblers' para- 

 dise — or hell, but he gives the details of 



an ingenious system, the author of 

 which died miserably poor in a London 

 suburb while his pupils were daily win- 

 ning considerable sums at Monte Carlo. 

 The ingenious inventor called himself 

 " the Conqueror." His system, when 

 tested " over more than 50,000 authen- 

 tic spins of the roulette wheel, has given 

 the surprising average of four wins 

 more than the Bank on each hundred 

 coups, after annihilating the zero per- 

 centage, and actual play at the tables 

 has corroborated these results." So 

 there is something in system after all ! 



THE DESTINY OF SWITZERLAND. 



The future of the Swiss Republic is 



causing grave concern to those who love 



the mountains, and the mountain people 



most of all. Francis Gribble, in the 



Edinbiir gh Review, speaks of the 



changes which have taken place during 



the last few years, and of their bearing 



on the years to come : — 



It has long been the fashion to praise 

 Switzerland and congratulate the Swiss. The 

 Swiss have freely praised themselves, and 

 their foreign critics have echoed their eulo- 

 gies, albeit with a suspicion of condescending 

 patronage in their manner, as though they 

 were patting Sunday school children on the 

 head, or exhorting the sluggard to considea* 

 the ways of the ant, or inviting admiration 

 of the well-ordered economy of the bee-hive. 



A WHISPER OF ALARM. 



Provincialism has, on the whole, been a 

 success in .Switaerland. The Swiss have 

 solved many difficult problems with ingenuity 

 and originality. They have produced great 

 results with snrall resources. They have 

 shown what the plain man can do in the 

 Avay of government without the help of a 

 ruling class, of "gentlemen," of men of 

 leisure, of millionaires, of professional poli- 

 ticians. The process has been, at once very 

 instructive and very interesting to watch, 

 and has afforded many useful object-lessons 

 in the art, not only of administration, but 

 of living ; and it is precisely' for that reason 

 that one is impressed by the appearance, 

 during the last few years, of a number of 

 books about Switzerland in which a new note 

 is sounded. It is a note of anxiety, and al- 

 most of alarm, though one cannot detect in 

 it anything of the sensationalism of the 

 scaremonger. The books only echo the ap- 

 prehensions of the more thoughtful of the 

 Swiss journalists ; and Switzerland is pro- 

 bably the country of Europe in which jour- 

 nalists are most prone to think before they 

 write. It is no part of their programme 

 to make the flesii of their readers creep, and 

 there is no group among them irrevocably 

 committed to the doctrine, so popular in 

 England, that the country is going tc the 



dogs. They do not write at the top of their 

 voices like Mr. Garvin and Mr. Maxse; they 

 do not juggle with figures like our Tariff 

 Reform pamphleteers; on the contrary, they 

 study statistics with tlie thoroughness of 

 statisticians, and draw their inferences with 

 the comparative calm of professors. Their 

 natural inclination is to believe that all is 

 for the best in the best of all possible Con- 

 federations; and if they come to the con- 

 clusion that there is something rotten in the 

 state of Switzerland, they come to it with 

 intense reluctance. 



FACTORS MAKING FOR CHANGE. 

 The development of industry, the de- 

 population of the country, the declining 

 birth-rate, the increase in the popula- 

 tion of the towns, and the turning of 

 the Republic into a gigantic exhibition 

 are cited in support of the writer's 

 contentions : — 



No one who has read the summary and 

 grasped the significance of the details can 

 feel confident that tiie Switzerland of the 

 future will bear much resemblance to the 

 Switzerland of the past, or even of the 

 present. The case is not at all like that of 

 France, where tJae tendencies which are 

 sometimes alleged to be making for disrup- 

 tion and decav encounter uhe resistance of a 

 solid population of 40,000,000 people. The 

 population of Switzerland, at the census of 

 1910, was only 3,738,600. The forces at work 

 are out of all proportion to the resistance 

 which is likely to be presented to them, and 

 thoiightful Swiss citizens are consequently 

 asking themselves : How long will the in- 

 habitants of Switzerland continue to be 

 Swiss? Will the development of Swiss manu- 

 facturing industries transform Switzerland 

 into a kind of Lancashire? Will the develop- 

 ment of the Fremden Industrie make of 

 Switzerland a kind of International Exhi- 

 bition, with illuminated waterfalls, and 

 snowpeaks accessible by electric railways as 

 the side-shows? Will the octopus of Pan- 

 Germanism grip Switzerland with its far- 

 flung tentacles, and absorb it as a German 

 province? 



