Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 2.djvu/198

308 would not on the present occasion touch, however faintly, a note of sadness. Let us be content with McCormick's happy suggestion that our old friends are with us in spirit this evening. Gaps there may be, but our ranks are still close. Among our founders—those who have written after their names those mystic letters 'O.M.,' signifying alternatively 'Original Member,' or to us the rare 'Order of Merit'—(hear, hear)—those who are still with us are both present to-night in the persons of Walters and Wills."

In the following remarks Mr. Douglas Freshfield struck a keynote: "And now they, and we, are called on to a more arduous task—to preserve our conquest. The Alps are threatened with invasion by a horde of Goths and Vandals: the company-promoter, the syndicate and the speculator. Men who know not Nature, and whose God is Mammon, are in the field. They make pretence to be philanthropists. They would have us believe that they desire to benefit the peasantry and the economic tourist. It is a false pretence. What does the peasant, the guide, the driver, or the local innkeeper gain by the crowd, done by contract, that is whirled past his door? What does the tourist gain that is carted, tightly packed in a covered van, through scenery he could better see in a cinematoscope? I met the other day in Switzerland a specimen of the modern tourist. 'Sir,' said he, 'I wish to sample the glasher region. Can you tell me if I can do it from Berne in a day without sleeping out?' He did it, and found it 'less extensive than he had anticipated.'

"It is for this class of travellers that the modern engineer is set to work. For them he has veiled the Staubbach in sooty reek; for them he has turned the flowery turf of the Wengern Alp into a Happy Hampstead; for them he is ready to plant a moving platform in the sublime solitudes of the Aletsch Glacier; for them he proposes to furnish the Matterhorn with a