Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/40

 26 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

mills I have not been able to get away from its effect. In Geneva our house stood on some hundreds of feet of the grind- ings of an ice mill that amounted to something. It was a body of ice some two hundred miles in length. It had a width varying from ten to a hundred miles. At Geneva this river of ice was squeezed in between mighty, pillars, having on the one side Mount Blanc as the highest sentinel, and the Jural Mountains on the other. One result was the plowing out of a hole in the earth which is now occupied by the waters of Lake Geneva. Another result was the reduction of stones broken off from the mountains in pieces as big as houses into pebbles such as boys throw at birds. These pebbles are now exposed, hun- dreds of feet in depth, on the banks of the Rhone and the Arve. And all the way from Geneva to Paris I observed that what they call the soil is composed in large part of these same peb- bles. The mill may have "ground slow" but it did not "grind fine" as did the mills which made for us the soil of Iowa.

As in Switzerland one may see in miniature the making of the soil of Europe, so likewise one may see in miniature the history of Europe. Each one of the twenty-two cantons has a special and peculiar history, which in most cases goes back to the beginning of modern history. In these cantons you have a little Germany, a little Italy, and a little France. Three races and three languages have been kept separate and distinct, yet by the action and inter-action of internal and external forces the three have been compacted into one nation with an esprit de corps scarcely equaled by any nation on earth.

It seems to me that any observer from the New World must be struck with the difference in spirit, tone, and method which comes from the mere fact of indigenous civilization. In Amer- ica we have the case of a transplanted civilization under cir- cumstances most favorable. We do not half appreciate the amount of humbug we get rid of by simply going away from it. Yet there are losses as well. In a new country there is a diffi- culty in taking anything seriously. We know that out in the Rockies even the graveyard is a sort of standing joke. So one