A great Italian traveler visited the little old Republic once, and I translate from a letter he wrote home. It is a novel letter: “The people of the St. Gall Republic are great traders and manufacturers, and are noted for their integrity. Weaving linen is their great industry. There are few failures in business, and cheating is a crime. The merchants and traders are mostly nobles. They travel when young and learn all languages. Flax is spun here to the fineness of a hair. The bleaching is wonderful, owing to the pure water of the Alps. The rich own many estates in the Rhine valley near by, and beautiful gardens are about the town. The taxes are small, but more than support the economical government. The surplus in the city treasury is loaned to citizens at low interest, to insure factories, house building, etc. Officers are held to terribly strict account. The blessings of heaven rest on the Republic as a reward for its charities, which are unbelievably great. No citizen is permitted to live in bitter distress. The people are extremely pious and the men appear in church (close by) several times a day, in white collars and black mantles, while women serve God only in black dresses.”[12]
With some modifications as to taxes, church-going, etc., this Italian’s letter would be a fair description of the people here to-day. The manufacturing industry of their fathers, in changed form, continues, and St. Gall is the first embroidery-making city of the world.
In its neighborhood, 30,000 people work at hand looms in their pleasant homes, making curtains, lace edgings, handkerchiefs--the delight of mankind. Great factories, working steam machines, are also filling the world’s market with the same articles. Designing these beautiful articles has become a St. Gall fine art. Nature helps the artist here, for after a moist day and a cold night in winter, the pines of the forest, the hedge rows, the lawn trees and the vines put on a magnificence of frost work absolutely indescribable. Millions of forest pines, drooping with icicles, snow and frost, resemble an ocean of Christmas trees glinting in the sunlit gates of paradise.
The people of St. Gall, surrounded as they are, could not help but make things beautiful. That many have grown rich at it, and live in beautiful villas on the heights about the city, is not to be wondered at.
Sometimes, though, a high American tariff, or bitter competition elsewhere, make hard times for the common embroiderer whose wages are never high. This very winter starvation stares many of the makers of the beautiful things in the face, and a franc a day is the poor pittance for twelve hours’ work. In better times even six francs are earned. Then the great shippers, who furnish the linen and cotton and silk to the peasants, and buy their embroideries from them, grow rich. St. Gall is full of rich people, and it is full of scholars and culture.
Once a year the city itself, at its own expense, gives all the schools a great festival and banquet on some high, green meadow. The sight of from five to ten thousand happy boys and girls, all in pretty costumes, bearing garlands and marching with banners and music, is not to be forgotten.
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The Sirocco or Foehn winds have been blowing for a week. Sunday, the fine town of Meyringen was burned up, seven hotels and three hundred houses. Nothing can save a town, once on fire, when this dry scorching wind blast is in the mountains. It is no longer believed to be a Sirocco, however, coming from the African desert, but a thing born of the changeful temperatures in the mountains. It is a disagreeable freak of nature, and half the people are ill when the Foehn wind blows. But it brings the mountains out in added grandeur, everything seems nearer, snow fields and lofty mountains forty miles away seem but five miles off. Their distinctness then is marvelous, their beauty tenfold.
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