FOOTNOTES:
[98] The letter of "W. H. W." commenced by stating that the writer had "waited till the discussion ... about domestic servants was brought to a close to make a few remarks on a subject touched on in Mr. Ruskin's last letter—domestic architecture." It then gave a "graphic description" of "W. H. W.'s" own modern villa and its miseries, and concluded by asking Mr. Ruskin if nothing could be done!
[99] "A Tenant, not at will" had written to point out the coincidence that he had, before the publication of Mr. Ruskin's third letter, himself begun a letter to the Daily Telegraph on the subject of houses, in parts of which, strangely enough, he had used expressions very similar to those of Mr. Ruskin (see ante, pp. [147]-8). He had described his modern suburban villa as "one of an ugly mass of blossoms lately burst forth from the parent trunk—a brickfield;" and declared that if it were not that people would think him mad, he "would infinitely rather live in a log hut of his own building" than in a builder's villa. He concluded by saying that all the houses were the same, and that therefore, until Mr. Ruskin could point out honest-built dwellings neglected while the "villas" were all let, it was not quite fair of him to assume that "suburban villains" utterly wanted the true instinct of gentlemen which would lead to the preference of log huts to plaster palaces.
[100] The account consisted of a report presented by Dr. Whitmore, as Metropolitan Officer of Health to the district, to the Marylebone Representative Council. Describing the miseries of Crawford Place, which was left in an untenantable condition, while the landlords still got high rents for it, he added that "property of this description, let out in separate rooms to weekly tenants, constitutes a most profitable investment," according to the degree of flinty determination exercised in collecting the rents.
[101] This alludes to an account of the position of the Cramlington colliers after seventeen days of strike. The masters attempted to evict the pitmen from their houses, an attempt which the pitmen met partly by serious riot and resistance, and partly by destroying the houses they were forced to leave.
[102] "Such a thing as a 'just price,' either for labor or for any other commodity, has, with all submission to Mr. Ruskin, no existence save in the minds of theorists." (Daily Telegraph, Oct. 10, quoted by the Pall Mall in its "Epitome of the Morning Papers" on the same day.) The discussion with the Gazette consisted of the "Work and Wages" letters (see ante, pp. 72 seqq.).
[103] See "Fors Clavigera," 1877, Letter 78, Notes and Correspondence, p. 170.
MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS.
III.
ROMAN INUNDATIONS.
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.
III.
ROMAN INUNDATIONS.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," January 12, 1871. Also reprinted in "Fors Clavigera," 1873, Letter 33, p. 23.]
A KING'S FIRST DUTY.
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:
"Dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus,
Et qua, pauper aquæ, Daunus agrestium
Regnavit populorum."[104]
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.