Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/531

 524 his frontier, a crop of discontents among his peasantry, carried from their homes to toil at the works; and there will he eventually a great crop of world’s jokes at the second failure of an Egyptian canal from sea to sea: but beyond such sorry crops the impoverished Pasha need look for no result. If he lingers on the memory of the prospect once spread fair before him, the waves and billows will only swamp his hopes the more drearily.

Egypt is indeed inundated with calamity. The waters will go down some day, and leave her fresh and fertile, as she will be while the Nile flows; but the people deserve all sympathy and compassion while awaiting the subsidence of the flood.

In many countries there have been devastations from literal floods of late. In France, Spain, and Germany, rivers have brimmed over their banks, torrents have rushed from the high lands, canals have burst their embankments; land-marks are swept away, and corn and seed-fields are turned into stony deserts. The condition of Holland, a few months since, when the whole country seemed likely to be swallowed up in the sea, is full in our memories. Worse even than the fate of the poor villagers sitting on the dykes in the rain, seeing their perch crumbling down into the dashing waves, must be the fate of the miners who were the other day swamped fathoms deep in the earth. At Bessèges, in the south of France, a waterspout destroyed the machinery of the mines, and sent a torrent over the edge of the pit, like a cataract. The gas exploded, all was confusion; and when the prefect of the department and his officials were moving about with torches at midnight, amidst a pallid crowd who watched their proceedings with jealous eagerness, it was because hundreds of men and boys were buried below. Day after day did pick and spade work (if they are not working still) to let out the living; and wonderfully strong were the voices of the prisoners of the flood: but there must have been many who died a death in comparison with which the strangulation of drowning is an easy end.

In India there has been a literal deluge overflowing the fertile districts of Bengal,—the indigo, cotton, and grain,—and plunging peasantry and landowners to the lips in poverty. But the worse calamity further west,—the famine and pestilence which were incessantly likened to a deluge,—has so far subsided as that a new growth of prosperity is already apparent. A blasting air seemed to have passed over the region, and the drought left a desolation behind it very like that of a ruinous flood. AU was bare, baked brown earth where crops should be waving: and all was lifeless where man and beast should have been plying their industry. Then came pestilence, such as we find in our damp corners and villages on marsh land: and disease swept human beings into eternity as the Nile or the Scheldt flood carries the cattle out to sea. This was our latest inundation of calamity as a nation: and it is nearly gone past. We are warned to expect a flood of trouble in the coming months, from the bad weather in Ireland, impoverishing farmer and labourer for the season; and from the distress anticipated in our chief department of manufacture, we may expect to have a rising tide of Lancashire poverty to deal with, which we shall, I trust, meet with the best skill and kindliness we can muster for so great an occasion. There is another menace which will be met in a different temper. When we hear or read that a flood of Socialism is sweeping over the country, we may think the expression too strong; but nobody disputes the fact which it means to express. The tyranny and ruinous folly of the socialism of the hour, as manifested in the strike in the building-trades, is too large a topic for these pages: but it must have a word of notice as one of the devastating calamities of the time.

To the worst of all it is enough to allude. The Americans have cut their dykes, and destruction is foaming in, as some of us gave ample warning that it would. If one party cut the dyke, both were guilty of damming up the stream which should naturally have carried off the danger. Both are responsible for the existence of slavery at this day: and where slavery exists there is always a gathering of waters of wrath going on; and the eventual rush of destruction is only a question of time. The difference between them now is that the one section proposes to continue the damming practice, while the other has had enough of it, and is thinking of insisting on making all safe, and keeping the control of the tides henceforth. The spectacle meanwhile of the ravages of civil war in that favoured country is like what a severe Nile inundation would be in Prince Rasselas’ Happy Valley. And it is a calamity not limited to one seed time and harvest.

Here are floods, literal and symbolical, more than enough for a year.

2em

“,

“I am in a frightful mess again, and want you to pull me through. That, of course; for having mentioned the first, the second follows as a natural consequence. The worst of it is that I cannot get away from this place just now, and as you have been seedy, I won’t ask you to come all this way. But if you could manage to come over to Oldforest for some shooting towards the end of next week, I will meet you there. That will be time enough for us to decide on our next move. The whole thing is so brutally complicated, that it is no good my trying to tell you anything about it by letter. I should only confuse your mind. But it is a buster this time, and no mistake—worse than Augustine or the Pelham Park Steeple Chase.  “Yours (with dishevelled hair), “. “York, Tuesday.”

“I wonder what the little beast has been doing now,” said Charlie Rochford, as he threw down the foregoing epistle on his breakfast table, after a third perusal.

The “little beast” stood six feet two in his stockings, and was Charlie’s dearest friend; but the better he liked people, the worse names he called them. This is a peculiarity not confined to him, in the present day.

“I suppose I must go,” he said, continuing his soliloquy. “It is a horrid nuisance, though. I hate the place, and all the people in it—the