TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE WEST INDIAN DISASTER. THE great difficulty in speaking or writing of the awful catastrophe in the West Indies is to avoid hysterics. The terrible visibleness of the disasters, with some other causes of which we shall speak later on, not only stirs human sympathy to its depths, but to a certain degree impairs the judgment of ordinarily hard-headed men. They can only gasp as in the immediate presence of a great fire. The volcanic outbursts, for instance, will not cause "the ruin of the West Indies," as we see it affirmed, or even greatly impair their chances of prosperity. They will impair it a little, because they will check the invest- ment of capital there ; but they affect only four small islands —Martinique, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Dominica—which are all on one "earthquake belt," and if they constitute a menace for the future, it is rather to Venezuela, much of which lies on the same belt, than to, the fertile islands of the Caribbean Sea. The prosperity of the latter will con- tinue to depend on economic causes much more than on flaws in their structure, which again will have only a 'temporary effect. It is one of the many amazing facts of human nature that men forget the great disturbances of Nature as they forget pain, that the tornado-swept districts of the world are among the most thickly populated, that Neapolitans grow vines on the slopes of Vesuvius, and Sicilians on the lands threatened by Etna, while Stromboli, which is an island where the central volcano is never at rest, is never quitted by its population. Again, it is erroneous to talk of the destruction of life as exceeding all precedents of disaster. The storm-wave which some twenty- five years ago swept the rice-growing island in the mouth of the Ganges killed in twenty minutes just ten times the number who have perished in Martinique, all of them worthy . peasants and tax-paying subjects of Queen Victoria ; while the bursting of the dykes on the Yellow River drowned in two days at the lowest computation more than a hundred times as many They were Chinese, it is true, and therefore not missed ; but it is the number lost, not the multitude who survive, by which a disaster is measured. Exaggeration, however, though always to be deprecated, and that not only for intellectual reasons, is in the case of volcanic dis- turbances only natural. Greatly to their happiness, men 'are possessed with a conviction about the "firm founda- tions " of the earth which is practically as unalterable as the limitations on their sense of time and space. Not one man in a million even of the cultivated ever reflects that he is crawling on a little ball of rock and mould which probably encloses a molten mass, and which, at all events, 'is incessantly gyrating and rushing through space at inconceivable speed. When therefore, at intervals of centuries, the " firm foundations " are seen visibly to give way, his horror is of the kind which causes madness, a 'horror which extinguishes alike courage and sense. No man thinks himself a coward for flying before a volcano—though no doubt the unnamed Roman sentry of Pompeii stood, chained by discipline, till he perished with the gate he watched —and few men fly in the right direction, the dominant idea being to reach the open, preferentially the sea, as if there must be safety under the broad skies. This intensity of feeling extends far beyond those who are threatened, tb all who hear or read of the catastrophe, so that men still shiver at the fate of Pompeii, though the city and the civilisation to which it belonged have passed away for ages, and the fate of Lisbon has helped to make atheists a century after it has been rebuilt. There is, in fact, a separate horror generated when the doom strikes a city, though a city is far more liable to perish than a country- side, and though the extinction of the sufferers by whole families at once should be regarded as a mercy rather than as a special cause of desolation. Finally, perhaps above all, there is the awfully scenic character of volcanic catas- trophes,—the sudden explosion, the inconceivable blaze of fire, as if the heavens were' burning, the showers of ashes, the rush of blazing gases, the darkness which may last for days. We do not imagine that the sufferings of the unhappy citizens of St. Pierre lasted for any length of time, or that many of them were actually burned to death ; but mankind has a deep horror of fire, as is shown in its ideas of bell, and the belief that asphyxiation, which is a • rapid and even merciful death, supervenes at once, is almost confined to the scientific. The world, therefore, though it has seen many worse catastrophes, even in its modern period, will continue for centuries to think of the sudden effacement of St. Pierre as of one of those ghastly incidents in human history about which it is not good even for those capable of resignation to think too much, or try to understand too thoroughly. The exact agency by which men were destroyed on May 8th is still unknown, though the almost instantaneous firing of the city points to a shower of some- thing molten, as does the nudity of the bodies found, and the imperfect evidence of the few survivors on the Roddam,' the vessel which, though burning in every part, with little more than half its crew alive, was still steered by its Captain with almost unearthly courage out of the flaming harbour into safety.
Is there any alleviation possible for such a calamity ? We fear there is none except a great distribution of money, which will help to keep away famine and to avert the hopeless ruin that follows upon all such disturbances. All that can be done for immediate relief, such as the despatch from New York of nearly a million rations, is being done, and though much help will arrive too late, three of the greatest Governments in the world are exerting themselves with a kind of fury which, being shared by their agents, is sure within a few days to be effective, and for those few days the unhappy islanders must stave off death by the expedients which the desperate fortunately often find. They escape the paralysing effect of cold, and if there is but water, about which we read some ominous but as yet unconfirmed rumours, those who are bent on their relief will find thousands alive. Nature, though far more liable to spasmodic outbursts of wrath, is not so perma- nently hostile in the tropics to the idle or the paralysed as in our comparatively infertile Europe. It is possible, of course, to remove the survivors altogether from the volcanic belt, and so make a recurrence of such a calamity exceed- ingly improbable ; but the Governments chiefly concerned will shrink from ruining their islands, and if they did not the people would not voluntarily go. No liability to light- ning will make the majority of men put up a lightning- rod, nor will any extremity of past danger prevent culti- vators from swarming to the spots where the permanent warmth of the soil gives them crops with a minimum of labour. St. Pierre will be rebuilt as Lisbon was, and St. Vincent within ten years will again be covered with cultivation. What is possible is to make the struggle a little easier for the survivors by advances of money, so that they may tide over next year at least and have some hope from their industry; and this, we think, should be done without too pedantic an adherence to economic maxims. The sums required will not be excessive,' and there is no danger either of setting a bad precedent or of pauperising anybody. A cultivator of Martinique or St. Vincent cannot summon La Pelee or La Souffriere to his aid when he next needs money, nor is there the slightest additional risk because such aid is afforded that once more this generation may behold the scene- " When, shrivelling like a parched scroll, The flaming heavens together roll."
Previous page
