history can be set forth without compression in a few lines of a
guide-book. Her one and only hero--William Tell--never, as we now know,
existed. He has been proved to be a myth. Also, he is the one and only
myth that Switzerland has managed to create. He exhausted her poor
little stock of imagination. Living as pigmies among the blind excesses
of Nature, living on sufferance there, animalculae, her sons have been
overwhelmed from the outset, have had no chance whatsoever of
development. Even if they had a language of their own, they would have
no literature. Not one painter, not one musician, have they produced;
only couriers, guides, waiters, and other parasites. A smug, tame, sly,
dull, mercenary little race of men, they exist by and for the alien
tripper. They are the fine flower of commercial civilisation, the
shining symbol of international comity, and have never done anybody any
harm. I cannot imagine why the King should not give them the
incomparable advertisement of a visit.

Not that they are badly in need of advertisement over here. Every year
the British trippers to Switzerland vastly outnumber the British
trippers to any other land--a fact which shows how little the romantic
imagination tells as against cheapness and comfort of hotels and the
notion that a heart strained by climbing is good for the health. And
this fact does but make our Sovereign's abstention the more remarkable.
Switzerland is not 'smart,' but a King is not the figure-head merely of
his entourage: he is the whole nation's figure-head. Switzerland, alone
among nations, is a British institution, and King Edward ought not to
snub her. That we expect him to do so without protest from us, seems to
me a rather grave symptom of flunkeyism.

Fiercely resenting that imputation, you proceed to raise difficulties.
'Who,' you ask, 'would there be to receive the King in the name of the
Swiss nation?' I promptly answer, 'The President of the Swiss
Republic.' You did not expect that. You had quite forgotten, if indeed
you had ever heard, that there was any such person. For the life of
you, you could not tell me his name. Well, his name is not very widely
known even in Switzerland. A friend of mine, who was there lately,
tells me that he asked one Swiss after another what was the name of the
President, and that they all sought refuge in polite astonishment at
such ignorance, and, when pressed for the name, could only screw up
their eyes, snap their fing