s, I grieve to say,
the deepest reason to doubt; and that the more, because the question is
not whether the mountaineer can be raised into a happier life by the
help of the active nations of the plains; but whether he can yet be
protected from the infection of the folly and vanity of those nations. I
urged, in the preceding chapter, some consideration of what might be
accomplished, if we chose to devote to the help what we now devote to
the mockery of the Swiss. But I would that the enlightened population of
Paris and London were content with doing nothing;--that they were
satisfied with expenditure upon their idle pleasures, in their idle way;
and would leave the Swiss to their own mountain gloom of unadvancing
independence. I believe that every franc now spent by travellers among
the Alps tends more or less to the undermining of whatever special
greatness there is in the Swiss character; and the persons I met in
Switzerland, whose position and modes of life rendered them best able to
give me true information respecting the present state of their country,
among many causes of national deterioration, spoke with chief fear of
the influx of English wealth, gradually connecting all industry with the
wants and ways of strangers, and inviting all idleness to depend upon
their casual help; thus gradually resolving the ancient consistency and
pastoral simplicity of the mountain life into the two irregular trades
of innkeeper[117] and mendicant.

Sec. 41. I could say much on this subject if I had any hope of doing good
by saying anything. But I have none. The influx of foreigners into
Switzerland must necessarily be greater every year, and the greater it
is, the larger, in the crowd, will be the majority of persons whose
objects in travelling will be, first, to get as fast as possible from
place to place, and, secondly, at every place where they arrive, to
obtain the kind of accommodation and amusement to which they are
accustomed in Paris, London, Brighton, or Baden. Railroads are already
projected round the head of the Lake of Geneva, and through the town of
Fribourg; the head of the Lake of Geneva being precisely and accurately
the one spot of Europe whose character, and influence on human mind, are
special; and unreplaceable if destroyed, no other spot resembling, or
being in any wise comparable to it, in its peculiar way: while the town
of Fribourg is in like manner the only mediaeval mountain town of
importance left to us