_, has its own established English sound; and if it is not
pedantry to attempt to give it the French sound when speaking English,
it certainly is not a mispronunciation to give it the English one.
Indeed, to require the French pronunciation of the word from English
speakers would be in effect to banish it almost altogether from
conversation; for among the ten millions, more or less, in England or
America, who speak English well, there is probably not one in a thousand
that can possibly give the word its true French pronunciation.

In reading this book, therefore, and in speaking of the great Swiss
mountain, you are perfectly safe in giving it its plain English sound,
as if it were written Mont Blank; and remember the principle, as
applicable to all other similar cases. Wherever a foreign name has
become so familiar to the English world as to have obtained an
established English pronunciation, in speaking English we give it that
pronunciation, without any regard to the usage of the people who live on
the spot.

But now I must return to Geneva, and give some further account of the
reasons why it has been so celebrated.

3. The third reason why Geneva has acquired so much celebrity among
mankind is the great number of learned and distinguished philosophers
and scholars that have from time to time lived there. Switzerland is a
republic, and the canton of Geneva is Protestant; and thus the place has
served as a sort of resort and refuge for all the most distinguished
foes both of spiritual and political tyranny that have risen up in
Europe at intervals during the last five hundred years. Geneva was
indeed one of the chief centres of the Reformation; and almost all the
great reformers visited it and wrote about it, and thus made all the
world familiar with it, during the exciting times in which they lived.

Besides this, Geneva has been made the residence and home of a great
many moral and political writers within the last one or two centuries;
for the country, being republican, is much more open and free than most
of the other countries of Europe. Men who have incurred the displeasure
of their own governments by their writings or their acts find a safe
asylum in Geneva, where they can think and say what they please. All
this has tended very strongly to attract the attention of mankind to
Geneva, as to a sort of luminous point in respect to moral and
political science, from which light radiates to every part of the
civili