IMPOVERISHED SWITZERLAND.
[To run Rams or sun oSrecrason."3
Sur,—Amidst the many appeals now being made to the eon. eideration of the charitable, one small claim in particular is in danger of being forgotten. During the anxious weeks of last August, when some thousands of our countrymen and country- women were stranded in Switzerland, acknowledgment was frequently made of the kindness with which they were treated by the proprietors of Swiss hotels. No doubt the latter were themselves very badly hit; but joint-stock companies and well-to-do owners of great establishments are in a position to meet the shocks of adverse fortune with more or less quiet minds.
• Sir Hugh Chonnley, (Arian to some sumessial experiments in breakoraisr building on his property at Whitby, was entrusted by Charles II. with the mai. struetion of the at Tangierhich work he personalkomperrisegfer gems months until superseded.-8H . N.S.N. With your kind permission, I would put in a word on behalf of quite another kind of hotel-owner and his de- pendants. There must be many of your readers, climbers, walkers, or less strenons lovers of the Alps, who keep a warm other in their hearts for some small, unpretentious inn standing in a hamlet of the higher valleys and far removed from the lines of tourist traffic. These houses have had no "season " during the past stammer, and most of them are out of the way of the winter sportsman, who, in any case, is not likely to visit the country this winter in considerable numbers. The men of the villages, who usually earn money as guides or porters, are now, and have been since the first days of August, in arms on the frontier. Three hundred thousand Swine are so engaged at the present time. Those who know the hard lives which the inhabitants of these higher valleys lead per- force in normal times can imagine the distress which has fallen upon them in such times as the present. I have before me a letter written a few days ago from a modest hotel, long established in the Saasertal ; the writer is well known to many English people as the bard-working daughter of the house, without whose constant helpfulness many a summer holiday would have lost some of its pleasures. She tells of the almost entire absence of visitors during the past summer, and says that, between the war beyond the frontier and the mobilization within, she and her family are in a condition "so poor and wretched that they have not the means to buy bare necessaries." In these circumstances, what is the condition of her still poorer neighbours likely to be?
I write in the hope that this lady's words may find a response in the hearts of some who have pleasant memories of the remoter Swiss villages, and that those who are moved by them will get into communication with a responsible member of the village community which they know best. There is every room for assistance—I am, Sir, dr.c., J. W. ADAMSON. Icing's College. London.
[Professor Adamson's kindly thought has our warmest sympathy. This is not a case for a public subscription, but for the individual action of friend to friend. We sincerely trust that the pro-German feeling exhibited in parts of German-speaking Switzerland will not estrange British sympathy. We should rise above the fact that a subsidized Press has in certain eases perverted urban Swiss opinion. The majority of the mountaineers still stand, we believe, for freedom.—En. Spectator.]
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