Vol. XXXV, No. 6 



WASHINGTON 



June, 1919 



THE 



ATDONAL 

 ^APfflG 



COPYRIGHT. 1919. BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY. WASHINGTON. D C. 



THE MILLENNIAL CITY 



The Romance of Geneva, Capital of The League 



of Nations 



By Ralph A. Graves 



Author of "Fearful Famines of the Past/' "Ships for the Seven Seas," etc. 



WHETHER the League of Na- 

 tions prove a will-o'-the-wisp, 

 leading peoples into a morass 

 of war-breeding misunderstandings, or 

 the beacon guiding them into the paths of 

 perpetual peace, Geneva, its capital, will 

 be known henceforth as the Millennial 

 City. . If the League succeeds, the Swiss 

 municipality will become the city set on a 

 hill, the center of man's moral universe. 

 Viscount Bryce has said that there are 

 four cities that belong to all men rather 

 than to any one nation — cities that have 

 influenced the whole world, or round 

 which its history has at one time or an- 

 other revolved ; cities in which students 

 and philosophers from every country are 

 equally interested. T,o these four — Je- 

 rusalem, Athens, Rome, and Constanti- 

 nople — must now be added Geneva. 



Jerusalem gave to western civilization 

 its religion. Athens was our great pre- 

 ceptress in liberty, literature, and art. 

 Rome was the mother who gave us our 

 laws and to most of us our language, 

 while the power of her political and ec- 

 clesiastical institutions still sways half the 

 globe. Constantinople, after the sacking 

 of Rome, became the preserver of civili- 

 zation, was the birthplace of the Justinian 

 Code, the seat of an empire for fifteen 



hundred years, and the link between the 

 waning glories of the Orient and the 

 growing splendors of the Occident. Gen- 

 eva now becomes the fountain-head of 

 what may be either the most noble tri- 

 umph or the most colossal failure in the 

 history of human endeavor. 



A HALF-WAY HOUSE BETWEEN BELLIGER- 

 ENTS DURING THE WAR 



Seated serenely on both banks of the 

 River Rhone, where it leaves the limpid 

 waters of Lake Geneva as a placid stream, 

 in contrast to the muddy turbulence of its 

 ingress at the other end of the lake, Gen- 

 eva is not the metropolis of the miniature 

 Republic of Switzerland, for Zurich sur- 

 passes it in population by 50 per cent and 

 Bern is the capital. But it is doubtful 

 whether before the world war any other 

 city of its size was visited annually by as 

 many tourists, for it was the main gate- 

 way into the world-famous "playground 

 of Europe." 



During the European conflict many of 

 the finest Swiss hotels, which in seasons 

 past have entertained thousands of Amer- 

 icans, suffered greatly for lack of wealthy 

 patronage, and the federal government 

 found it advisable to come to their 

 financial relief by passing an ordinance 



