A King's First Duty. 1871.
A Nation's Defences. 1871.
The Waters of Comfort. 1871.
The Streams of Italy. 1871.
The Streets of London. 1871.

[Pg 110]
[Pg 111]

III.

ROMAN INUNDATIONS.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: May I ask you to add to your article on the inundation of the Tiber some momentary invitation to your readers to think with Horace rather than to smile with him?

In the briefest and proudest words he wrote of himself he thought of his native land chiefly as divided into the two districts of violent and scanty waters:

Now the anger and power of that "tauriformis Aufidus" is precisely because "regna Dauni prÆfluit"—because it flows past the poor kingdoms which it should enrich. Stay it there, and it is treasure instead of ruin. And so also with Tiber and Eridanus. They are so much gold, at their sources—they are so much death, if they once break down unbridled into the plains.

At the end of your report of the events of the inundation, it is said that the King of Italy expressed "an earnest desire to do something, as far as science and industry could effect it, to prevent or mitigate inundations for the future."

Now science and industry can do, not "something," but everything, and not merely to mitigate inundations—and, deadliest of inundations, because perpetual, maremmas—but to change them into national banks instead of debts.

The first thing the King of any country has to do is to manage the streams of it.

If he can manage the streams, he can also the people; for the people also form alternately torrent and maremma, in pestilential fury or pestilential idleness. They also will change into living streams of men, if their Kings literally "lead them forth beside the waters of comfort." Half the money lost by this inundation of Tiber, spent rightly on the hill-sides last summer, would have changed every wave of it into so much fruit and foliage in spring where now there will be only burning rock. And the men who have been killed within the last two months, and whose work, and the money spent in doing it, have filled Europe with misery which fifty years will not efface,[105] they had been set at the same cost to do good instead of evil, and to save life instead of destroying it, might, by this 10th of January, 1871, have embanked every dangerous stream at the roots of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and left to Germany, to France, and to Italy an inheritance of blessing for centuries to come—they and their families living all the while in brightest happiness and peace. And now! Let the Red Prince look to it; red inundation bears also its fruit in time.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
John Ruskin.
Jan. 10.

To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."

Sir: The letter to which you do me the honor to refer, in your yesterday's article on the Tiber, entered into no detail,[106] because I had already laid the plans spoken of before the Royal Institution in my lecture there last February;[107] in which my principal object was to state the causes of the incalculably destructive inundations of the Rhone, Toccia, and Ticino, in 1868; and to point out that no mountain river ever was or can be successfully embanked in the valleys; but that the rainfall must be arrested on the high and softly rounded hill surfaces, before it reaches any ravine in which its force can be concentrated. Every mountain farm ought to have a dike about two feet high—with a small ditch within it—carried at intervals in regular, scarcely perceptible incline across its fields; with discharge into a reservoir large enough to contain a week's maximum rainfall on the area of that farm in the stormiest weather-the higher uncultivated land being guarded over larger spaces with bolder embankments. No drop of water that had once touched hill ground ought ever to reach the plains till it was wanted there: and the maintenance of the bank and reservoir, once built, on any farm, would not cost more than the keeping up of its cattle-sheds against chance of whirlwind and snow.

The first construction of the work would be costly enough; and, say the Economists, "would not pay." I never heard of any National Defences that did! Presumably, we shall have to pay more income-tax next year, without hope of any dividend on the disbursement. Nay—you must usually wait a year or two before you get paid for any great work, even when the gain is secure. The fortifications of Paris did not pay, till very lately; they are doubtless returning cent. per cent. now, since the kind of rain falls heavy within them which they were meant to catch. Our experimental embankments against (perhaps too economically cheap) shot at Shoeburyness are property which we can only safely "realize" under similarly favorable conditions. But my low embankments would not depend for their utility on the advent of a hypothetical foe, but would have to contend with an instant and inevitable one; yet with one who is only an adversary if unresisted; who, resisted, becomes a faithful friend—a lavish benefactor.

Give me the old bayonets in the Tower, if I can't have anything so good as spades; and a few regiments of "volunteers" with good Engineer officers over them, and, in three years' time, an Inundation of Tiber, at least, shall be Impossible.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
Denmark Hill, Jan. 19, 1871.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: I did not see your impression of yesterday until too late to reply to the question of your correspondent in Rome;[108] and I am hurried to-day; but will send you to-morrow a precise statement of what I believe can be done in the Italian uplands. The simplest and surest beginning would be the purchase, either by the Government or by a small company formed in Rome, of a few plots of highland in the Apennines, now barren for want of water, and valueless; and the showing what could be made of them by terraced irrigation such as English officers have already introduced in many parts of India. The Agricultural College at Cirencester ought, I think, to be able to send out two or three superintendents, who would direct rightly the first processes of cultivation, choosing for purchase good soil in good exposures, and which would need only irrigation to become fruitful; and by next summer, if not by the end of this, there would be growing food for men and cattle where now there is only hot dust; and I do not think there would be much further question "where the money was to come from." The real question is only, "Will you pay your money in advance for what is actually new land added to the kingdom of living Italy?" or "Will you pay it under call from the Tiber every ten or twenty years as the price of the work done by the river for your destruction?"

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin.
Oxford, Feb. 3.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: In this month, just thirty years ago, I was at Naples, and the days were nearly as dark as these, but with clouds and rain, not fog. The streets leading down from St. Elmo became beds of torrents. A story went about—true or not I do not know, but credible enough—of a child's having been carried off by the gutter and drowned at the bottom of the hill. At last came indeed what, in those simple times, people thought a serious loss of life. A heavy storm burst one night above a village on the flank of the Monte St. Angelo, a mile or two south of Pompeii. The limestones slope steeply there under about three feet of block earth. The water peeled a piece of the rock of its earth, as one would peel an orange, and brought down three or four acres of the good soil in a heap on the village at midnight, driving in the upper walls, and briefly burying some fourteen or fifteen people in their sleep—and, as I say, in those times there was some talk even about fourteen or fifteen. But the same kind of thing takes place, of course, more or less, among the hills in almost every violent storm, generally with the double result of ruining more ground below than is removed from the rocks above; for the frantic streams mostly finish their work with a heap of gravel and blocks of stone like that which came down the ravine below the glacier of Greppond about ten years ago, and destroyed, for at least fifty years to come, some of quite the best land in Chamouni.

In slower, but ceaseless process of ruin, the Po, Arno, and Tiber steadily remove the soil from the hills, and carry it down to their deltas. The Venetians have contended now for a thousand years in vain even with the Brenta and the minor streams that enter their lagoons, and have only kept their canals clear by turning the river south to Malamocco with embankments which have unhealthily checked the drainage of all the flat country about Padua.

And this constant mischief takes place, be it observed, irrespective of inundation. All that Florence, Pisa, and Rome have suffered and suffer periodically from floods is so much mischief added to that of increasing maremmas, spoiled harborages, and lost mountain-ground.

There is yet one further evil. The snow on the bared rock slips lower and melts faster; snow, which in mossy or grass ground would have lain long, and furnished steadily flowing streams far on into summer, fall or melt from the bare rock in avalanche and flood, and spend in desolation in a few days what would have been nourishment for half the year. And against all this there are no remedies possible in any sudden or external action. It is the law of the Heaven which sends flood and food, that national prosperity can only be achieved by national forethought and unity of purpose.

In the year 1858 I was staying the greater part of the summer at Bellinzona, during a drought as harmful as the storms of ten years later. The Ticino sank into a green rivulet; and not having seen the right way to deal with the matter, I had many a talk with the parroco of a little church whose tower I was drawing, as to the possibility of setting his peasants to work to repair the embankment while the river was low. But the good old priest said, sorrowfully, the peasants were too jealous of each other, that no one would build anything or protect his own ground for fear his work might also benefit his neighbors.

But the people of Bellinzona are Swiss, not Italians. I believe the Roman and Sienese races, in different ways, possess qualities of strength and gentleness far more precious than the sunshine and rain upon their mountains, and, hitherto, as cruelly lost. It is in them that all the real power of Italy still lives; it is only by them, and by what care, and providence, and accordant good-will ever be found in them, that the work is to be done, not by money; though, if money were all that is needed, do we in England owe so little to Italy of delight that we cannot so much as lend her spades and pick-axes at her need? Would she trust us? Would her government let us send over some engineer officers and a few sappers and miners, and bear, for a time, with an English instead of a French "occupation" of her barrenest hills?

But she does not need us. Good engineers she has, and has had many since Leonardo designed the canals of Lombardy. Agriculturists she has had, I think, among her gentlemen a little before there were gentlemen farmers in England; something she has told us of agriculture, also, pleasantly by the reeds of Mincio and among the apple-blossoms wet with Arno. Her streams have learned obedience before now: Fonte Branda and the Fountain of Joy flow at Sienna still; the rivulets that make green the slopes of Casentino may yet satisfy true men's thirst. "Where is the money to come from?" Let Italy keep her souls pure, and she will not need to alloy her florins. The only question for her is whether still the mossy rock and the "rivus aquÆ" are "in rotis" or rather the racecourse and the boulevard—the curses of England and of France.

At all events, if any one of the Princes of Rome will lead, help enough will follow to set the work on foot, and show the peasants, in some narrow district, what can be done. Take any arid piece of Apennine towards the sources of the Tiber; let the drainage be carried along the hill-sides away from the existing water-courses; let cisterns, as of old in Palestine, and larger reservoirs, such as we now can build, be established at every point convenient for arrest of the streams; let channels of regulated flow be established from these over the tracts that are driest in summer; let ramparts be carried, not along the river banks, but round the heads of the ravines, throwing the water aside into lateral canals; then terrace and support the looser soil on all the steeper slopes; and the entire mountain side may be made one garden of orange and vine and olive beneath; and a wide blossoming orchard above; and a green highest pasture for cattle, and flowers for bees—up to the edge of the snows of spring.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
Oxford, Feb. 3.

To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."

Sir: I have been every day on the point of writing to you since your notice, on the 18th,[110] of the dirty state of the London streets, to ask whether any of your readers would care to know how such matters are managed in my neighborhood. I was obliged, a few years ago, for the benefit of my health, to take a small house in one of the country towns of Utopia; and though I was at first disappointed in the climate, which indeed is no better than our own (except that there is no foul marsh air), I found my cheerfulness and ability for work greatly increased by the mere power of getting exercise pleasantly close to my door, even in the worst of the winter, when, though I have a little garden at the back of my house, I dislike going into it, because the things look all so dead; and find my walk on the whole pleasanter in the streets, these being always perfectly clean, and the wood-carving of the houses prettier than much of our indoor furniture. But it was about the streets I wanted to tell you. The Utopians have the oddest way of carrying out things, when once they begin, as far as they can go; and it occurred to them one dirty December long since, when they, like us, had only crossing-sweepers, that they might just as well sweep the whole of the street as the crossings of it, so that they might cross anywhere. Of course that meant more work for the sweepers; but the Utopians have always hands enough for whatever work is to be done in the open air;—they appointed a due number of brooms-men to every quarter of the town; and since then, at any time of the year, it is in our little town as in great Rotterdam when Doctor Brown saw it on his journey from Norwich to Colen in 1668, "the women go about in white slippers," which is pretty to see.[111] Now, Sir, it would, of course, be more difficult to manage anything like this in London, because, for one thing, in our town we have a rivulet running down every street that slopes to the river; and besides, because you have coal-dust and smoke and what not to deal with; and the habit of spitting, which is worst of all—in Utopia, a man would as soon vomit as spit in the street (or anywhere else, indeed, if he could help it). But still it is certain we can at least anywhere do as much for the whole street, as we have done for the crossing; and to show that we can, I mean, on 1st January next, to take three street-sweepers into constant service; they will be the first workpeople I employ with the interest of the St. George's fund, of which I shall get my first dividend this January; and, whenever I can get leave from the police and inhabitants, I will keep my three sweepers steadily at work for eight hours a day; and I hope soon to show you a bit of our London streets kept as clean as the deck of a ship of the line.[112]

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
December 27, 1871.

MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS.