THE MILLENNIAL CITY 



459 



extending the time for payment of in- 

 terest on mortgages. 



Other hostelries, however, were as 

 crowded during the four years of horror 

 and bloodshed as are the fashionable 

 caravansaries of New York during Horse 

 Show and Automobile Show weeks. But 

 it was a kind of patronage different from 

 any to which Geneva had catered since the 

 days of the Reformation. Refugees from 

 the belligerent countries flocked here, and 

 thousands of interned soldiers were fed 

 and housed by the government at a con- 

 tract price, the country to which the sol- 

 dier belonged reimbursing the Swiss. 



Here, too, assembled the propagan- 

 dists of every creed and complexion. 

 Geneva, and in fact all Switzerland, 

 fairly seethed with plot and counterplot, 

 as agents and spies trafficked in military 

 secrets and in the honor of foreign public 

 officials. Here the nascent nations of 

 middle Europe organized their bureaus 

 of publicity and sent forth their pleas for 

 recognition. Thus the Republic became 

 the busy half-way house between the bel- 

 ligerent forces. 



THE SORROWS AND GLORIES OE GENEVA'S 



PAST 



Although its recorded history goes back 

 beyond the Christian era, to the time when 

 Julius Caesar, in his commentaries on his 

 first expedition into Gaul, mentions it as 

 a stronghold of the Allobroges, its growth 

 has been phenomenal only in its leisure- 

 liness. Today, after twenty centuries, it 

 has less than one-third the population 

 of the century-old capital of the United 

 States. 



But size has never been an infallible 

 criterion by which to appraise influence. 

 In the days of Perfcles, the period of 

 her greatest glory, Athens could boast of 

 only 50,000 freemen — scarcely more than 

 would have filled the stadium of Herodes 

 Atticus, laid out by Lycurgus in the suc- 

 ceeding century ! 



Coupled with the heroism of the strug- 

 gle of the Genevese against the Dukes of 

 Savoy to secure political independence 

 was the noble humanitarianism which 

 prompted its inhabitants to accord shelter 

 and succor to the fugitives from the sham- 

 bles of the St. Bartholomew massacres 



in France and the persecutions during 

 that era in England. 



The city enjoys the distinction of being 

 the birthplace of the International Red 

 Cross, but also has some dark chapters 

 in its past — the religious excesses of the 

 Reformation, when the persecuted be- 

 came the persecutors. 



With such historic events must be as- 

 sociated the names of native sons, vis- 

 itors, and exiles whose lives have added 

 luster to the city and romance to its 

 story. Rousseau, of whom Napoleon 

 said, "Without him, France would not 

 have had her Revolution" ; and the patriot 

 Bonivard, whose trials Byron immortal- 

 ized as the Prisoner of Chillon, were Gen- 

 evans. Farel, the Billy Sunday of his 

 day, who could not be made to desist from 

 preaching, even though the women of his 

 congregation dragged him up and down 

 the aisles of the church by his beard, made 

 the lake city his headquarters during his 

 ascendancy. And John Calvin, "who 

 found Geneva a bear garden and left it a 

 docile school of piety," was virtual dicta- 

 tor here for a quarter of a century. 



Here, too, came Voltaire, who, as an 

 exile from the court of Frederick the 

 Great and from his own France, found 

 it "very pleasant to live in a country 

 where rulers borrow your carriage to 

 come to dine with you." John Knox, the 

 Scotch reformer, described this, his city 

 of refuge, as "the place where I fear nor 

 ashame to say is the most perfect school 

 of Christ that ever was on the earth since 

 the days of the Apostles" ; but Madame 

 de Stael, even amid the luxury of her 

 Coppet estate, could not be reconciled to 

 her banishment from Paris, as she gazed 

 upon the sublimest glaciers of the Swiss 

 Alps and sighed for "a sight of the gutters 

 of the Rue du Bac." Byron and Shelley 

 spent the fruitful summer of 1816 in ad- 

 joining villas in the outskirts. 



A PHANTOM PROCESSION OE THE GREAT 



Such are the people of Geneva's past — 

 some gay, but most grave — with whom 

 we can promenade arm in arm in phan- 

 tom procession through the beautiful 

 Jardin Anglais ; along quays from which 

 we glimpse the gleaming radiance of 

 Mont Blanc; beneath the magnificent 

 monument erected to the memory of 



