wrought by water, and were possibly unconscious of earthquakes, a calamity fatal to all such building craft.
Now let us suppose what might be the result in London of an earthquake similar to that of Lisbon, and happening in the night. The single-storied dwellings of the poor might probably remain erect, though damaged; but what of the four and five storied dwellings of the middle classes—what of the huge palaces, piled floor on floor in the heart of London, and let out in offices? What of those ranges of houses in the main streets serving for shops, the whole fronts of which stand on slender stilts of cast-iron, which would crack like potsherds did they once overhang their bases. Oxford Street, Regent Street, the Strand and Holborn—all the buildings in main thoroughfares, whose front walls stand upon plate-glass, would fall prostrate at a blow, and choke the thoroughfares with heterogeneous ruins and the mashed frames of humanity. The huge Cathedral of St. Paul’s would bury its own churchyard in its fragments. The Bank and the Exchange would mingle their crumbled materials together; churches and their many spires would fall down; the warehouses and stone bridges on the river would block its channel, and the breached and riven banks would again convert the whole low-lying lands into the marsh that they were in the days of Julius Cæsar; but all putrid with dead bodies. Water and gas supply would cease, and the great sewers would be underground reservoirs of pestilence. A plague would supervene, and many hundreds of thousands would perish. The dockyards would be destroyed, and speculating despots on the Continent would gloat over the downfall of English supremacy, and talk of invading us with the pretext of help. The cast-iron bridge at Queen Street would not be left for the New Zealander, and though the forged upper structure at Charing Cross would be indestructible save by time and rust, the masonry of the piers would burst through the cast-iron casings, and leave the bridge a wreck. And meanwhile throughout England similar ruin might prevail, and commerce be stopped, and famine add its presence to other evils. The transit of food and fuel by water would cease, and the toppling down of brick viaducts would stop for a time all railway transit.
But men would be left, and women, racy of the soil, and the soil itself would continue to produce its fruits, and we should begin the world anew, but with a mass of knowledge to begin upon such as the world has never before massed together. The Colonies would suffer, for working men and women would become too valuable to be spared till we had again “filled up our numbers,” if war, prompted by our misfortunes, did not intervene. And if it did, we should still hold our own, and our Colonies would come to the help of the mother from whom they sprung.
After all, the evils of an earthquake would be less evils of nature than of art. The shaking of our soil can do no more to us than the shaking of the water round our soil. The trees and the corn and the fruits of the earth will continue to grow let the earth shake never so often. Only, if earthquakes are to come at frequent intervals, we must give up our luxuries of lofty buildings of brick and stone, and such-like brittle material, and betake ourselves to a material that will not break. Wood is combustible, and therefore dangerous; but we have an indigenous material that will neither break nor burn if rightly used—iron.
Nor, therefore, would there be a necessity of abandoning this home of storied greatness, even though earthquakes were to become perennial. We should have to build our dwellings as we now build our ships, of iron, and they would lie as well on the surface of the shaking land as our iron craft do on the surface of our shaking ocean, and the landsman might “seal up his eye and rock his brain” in cradle of the land as well as of “the rude impetuous surge;” and if men will make monuments to lift their tall spires to heaven they must build them of tough wrought iron, keeled deep in the ground, and formed like the iron masts of our war-ships, that still stand erect, let the vessel rock never so wildly. And take the very worst condition of an earthquake and all its consequences, better that than the atrocious civil war now raging between our descendants in America. We should not be demoralised, but become better and stronger men by our physical trials, and all the new circumstances we should have to surmount by improved art. Who shall say that such an event would not ultimately serve to increase our commerce, making us the iron-house builders for the earthquake zone of the earth, as we are already the iron shipbuilders to girdle the ocean round?
It is not good to live in fear, nor is it our habit. A fight with nature is better than a fight with our fellow man; and, after all, this world would be little worth living in were there no work to do to exercise the faculties and energies that God has given to us. The land where fruits grow spontaneously, and where peasants live on milk and chestnuts, as do wild animals, is no land for the grand old English race that has done more than all other races put together to win the world from the wilderness, and make it a habitation for civilised man.
We “went down to the sea in ships” along the river courses, but we did not stop there. We went on the sea also, and out into the great ocean. Storms came and men perished. It was not always in sailor craft to keep off a lee shore in a land-locked bay that offered no harbour of refuge. So when foul winds failed us, or only bore us hap hazard, we found out the force of steam, and made it our servant, and then in the teeth of wind and rain and hail and storm we left the lee-shore behind us, strong in our God-given might—given to save, and not to destroy. We laughed the tempest to scorn as we “clawed off the land,” and we shall find fitting remedies for earthquakes as well as waterquakes when we are once put to our work—if the earthquake should visit us in permanence. If we cannot make chimneys vertical we will make them horizontal; and if it should so happen that a Hecla were to take up its abode in the Scilly Islands, it would go hard but we should turn its hot-water privileges to special economical account, sparing the labour of many a coal-miner. We have heard of stray English travellers boiling their dinners in the Geysers for