GUIDE SYSTEMS

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 16, 19 January 1924, Page 16

GUIDE SYSTEMS

Interesting possibilities are. suggested by the determination of the Syndieat d'lnitiative of Paris to reform the whole guide system of the French capital, to insist on an examination for guides and to call in the help of the police.authorities in the work .of discrimination, states a_ correspondent of the ."Manchester Guardian." Every eity'with things to show has its own guides. Probably the guides of Rome are the most clamorous the most talkative, the least easily disposed of, so that, in the tourist season, people who have a fancy for seeing things for themselves are ape,to use very strong language about the whole guide question. The guides of the ' Swiss ■mountains are a race apart, and no one speaks of them" without respect and admiration. The guides of New York are probably unique in lung power, and in the gift of dashing at their work ' In London' we have evolved a, hew type of guide, thanks to Lord Sudeley and others—the scholarly museum guide who >s perhaps the pioneer of a new development of that misused, word "culture."' In some cities of the''Near-East there are' guides of whom the less said thn better.'and in Paris guides have acquired Tather a> bad reputation as the link between the tourist and that side of Paris life which, according to the Parisians, exists only to satisfy the demands of the tourists. If Paris succeeds in evolving the ideal guide-interpreter other cities will be .clad to copy him, for a really good corps of guides must be au asset to any city. Perhaps his first quality .should'be "a (genuine love of and pride in the things lie has to show, even if In rannot bp expected to rival Robert Chambers, "king of eicerones." the perfect amateur guide > for friends visiting Edinburgh sixty years i ago. The perfect guide must be well informed, but he must not overwhelm his employers. Nor must he dispiso them. __ Perhaps no great h?rm vri:l V-tf done if he, fives rein sometimes to his imagination, like the o!d e-.iide at Eridie who used to aseurp. I'i^iLors that tin1' model of an ancient sJiin was that ol' tiir identical v«srl in which tlic Xevilb came over with the C:onque.wr.