[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:
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[104] On December 27 there was a disastrous inundation of the Tiber, and a great part of Rome was flooded. The Daily Telegraph in its leading article of Jan. 10, 1871, on the subject, began by quoting from the "very neatest," "sparkling," "light-hearted" ode of Horace, "Jam satis terris nivis" (Horace, Odes, i. 2). The quotations in the letter are from Odes iv. 14, 25, and from the celebrated ode beginning "Exegi monumentum œre perennius" (Odes, iii. 30).
[105] This letter, it will be noticed, was written during the bombardment of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war.