Twenty Thousand Miles of Road Travel in Central and Western Europe (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901. Excerpt: ... Scarcely a high crime or misdemeanour set forth in the penal code but has been at one time or another laid to their charge. If not in the strictest sense of the word murderers, in that men have through their instrumentality destroyed themselves, they can be accounted such. Indirectly they are robbers; for although there be no cheating at the gaming-tables, a very considerable portion of the money deposited thereon, and raked in by the croupiers, belongs not to the gamesters, but to their wives and families, who, by its loss, are left destitute. They may not keep a bagnio, but by permitting ladies of more than doubtful virtue to frequent their establishment, encouragers are they of vice; and so on right through the calendar. Admit the charges proven, that the tables have been the perdition of hundreds. Per contra, they have been the means of affording honest employment to thousands of workers, and innocent enjoyment to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands non-gambling visitors. Without them the Speluges would have remained as nature made it, a barren rock; there would be no gardens, no concerts, no attractions whatever. To all save bigots, the good of the greater number is the consideration, and at Monaco the loss of the few has been the gain of the many. The gardens of Monte Carlo are an arboreal epitome of the entire earth. The deciduous trees of Europe intertwine their branches with their barkshedding Australian congeners; the palm trees of Asia and Africa nod their feathered heads to then mates from over the Atlantic; the arauoaria from Norfolk Island stands stem to stem with the thuja--the Washingtonia gigantea from the Yosemite Valley--whilst here and there, left where it stood, and completely out of alignment, one of the ancient occupants o...