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National Geographic : 1919 Jun
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THE MILLENNIAL CITY 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 OF 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 Pericles, 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 OF 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 459
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