THE RUIN OF SZEGEDIN.
Tfi-F,RE is a certain apathy in the English mind about catastrophes caused by floods which it is very curious to notice. They excite less interest and less attention than any other kind of great calamity. So incuriously are they watched, that people forget how often they occur in some parts of the world, and do not realise to themselves in the least that though far less dramatic, they are often more destructive than earth- quakes. The great floods which often ravage parts of Louisiana are less noticed than the most ordinary incidents in America, though a city like New Orleans, almost made by English capital, only lives by favour of its dykes ; and though there is no lack of the weer vases; Swiss floods are dismissed in a paragraph ; and even the French floods, which threaten whole districts and great towns, raise no serious discussion. The flood of 1875 which so nearly destroyed Thoulouse, though minutely described at the time, is totally forgotten, and even the flood of Deccan-Shabaz- pore, which, in 1876, swept away half a million of British subjects, is a vague historic recollection. That was far and away the greatest catastrophe of our time, as regards the destruction of life andproperty; was perfectly described by a most competent autho- rity, Sir Richard Temple, and was attended by circumstances so unique as should have stamped it into the minds of the whole people. Never before in the history of our race was there such an incident,—a British county, inhabited by nearly six hundred thousand souls, depopulated in a night by the rush of a storm- wave, the few survivors, some thousands, owing their lives to being flung upon the thorns of the spiky trees abounding in the district. Yet the catastrophe was forgotten in a month ; it was not introduced into the Indian paragraph of the Queen's 'Speech, and. we venture to say that most of our readers will
recall the event, which was minutely described in our own columns, with a sensation of surprise that its occurrence should have so nearly escaped them. The destruction of the Hungarian city, Szegedin, which has been going on for nearly a week, is in many ways an almost unparalleled
catastrophe. We cannot recall the destruction of a European city by water before. The destruction of house property is pro- bably as great as in the earthquake of Lisbon, and though the loss of life is much smaller—probably not a fourth—it has still been very great. The officials make as light of it as they can, but the best observers place the loss at 4,000, while the expul- sion and ruin of a population as great as that of Norwich, thousands of whom passed forty-eight hours in a marsh flooded with ice-cold water, without food, or firing, or shelter, repre- sents a frightful aggregate of human misery. The destruction, too, was so complete. A city of 70,000 people is, on the Con- tinent, a first-class city ; and Szegedin was a prosperous place, full of large warehouses, with a great trade in wool, and corn, and timber, and inhabited by a people so well off that they often refuse aid, and that an English reporter, observing them, declares that their prosperity has developed in them an almost American self-reliance. All Hungary has felt the shock, and the Hungarian Parliament seemed for a few hours as if it would become uncontrollable with grief and rage,—grief for the people, and rage at a certain want of foresight which the ma- jority thought they perceived in the official arrangements. The total destruction of such a city is almost unique, or quite unique, in European annals ; yet the interest felt in the occurrence here has been somewhat languid, and the subscriptions in aid, though liberal as far as individuals are concerned, have not risen to the dimensions which in England indicate that public feeling has been stirred. They do not approach the subscrip- tions for the survivors of the Princess Alice.' There has been nothing to check the flow of feeling. Hungary has been always popular in England ; the people of Szegedin have behaved with great patience and courage—the cases of incendiaaism being, we imagine, the result of efforts to save the insurances, which were not granted against water, but against fire—and the place, though little known here, was civilised enough to be within the range of Western sympathy. Nevertheless, that sympathy has been comparatively tame. We presume the reason is that the Eng.' lish people, nearly exempt as they are from serious floods—a few inches of water " out " on the meadows is a " flood " here— do not realise what a flood is, or what fifteen feet of water in a city of sun-baked bricks on a marshy foundation actually means'. They would understand an earthquake, but the slow collapse of a city in the water, the quick saturation of the soil, the yielding of the foundations, and then the toppling down, hour by hour, of houses, usually in patches at a time, according to the condition of the soil or previously unnoticed differences of level, does not come clearly home to their imaginations. They do not feel that a flood like this accumulates on its victims' heads the suffering caused by an epidemic, the horror of whole families perishing at once, and the suffering caused by a grand financial catastrophe. Thousands must have been made childless and pauperised by one and the same blow. It requires effort to think out processes men have not seen— though one day they may see something like it on the banks of the Thames—and they do not make the effort. There is not, that we know of, anywhere in England a place quite under the conditions of Szegedin, planted in a marsh, with a river the bed of which has been raised like the bed of the Po, in parts of its course, by continuous embanking, till its floor is distinctly above the plain, and safety depends entirely on the solidity of the dykes. The explanation does not quite satisfy us, for there are close analogies between a flood and a shipwreck, and in ship- wrecks the English interest is of the keenest character ; but it is the only one in which we can see any probability.
It is believed that Szegedin will be rebuilt in the same place, with stronger dykes ; and if so, the population will flow back, and then go on increasing as before. The site chose itself, as it were, and, like all self-chosen sites, will not be deserted. The junction of the Theiss and the Maros in a country like Hungary, where water-carriage is everything, the vast spaces rendering all other carriage too dear, is too convenient a spot to be abandoned, and all experience proves that no fear of cata- clysms recurrent at uncertain intervals will deter ordinary folk from the pursuit of a livelihood. The yellow fever does not empty New Orleans. No one quits the Mainland of the Orkneys because it was once swept by a storm-wave, and might be again.
The wave-swept island of Deccan-Shabazpore will be filled up. The people have gathered like ants for ages at the foot of Vesuvius, and if Pompeii were destroyed once more would gather again, rather than surrender the warm slopes where the olive flour- ishes so well, back to Nature and the desert. The slowness of mankind to quit homes where they can live pleasantly in the intervals of disaster is incurable, and the people of the new Szegedin will sleep without minding the Theiss, and with- out watching the dykes which protect them much more carefully than of old. Villages built at the foot of reservoirs do not empty for fear of the flood, nor are Swiss villages deserted in positions where the avalanche must come some day. The mass of mankind look forward very little, and seem quite incapable of imagining that the habitual rule of the nature around them will ever be broken ; that the earthquake which has not occurred for centuries will happen in their time, or that the dyke which has been safe for a year may any day give passage to the waters. They think, if they think at all, that they will be forewarned, and leave cataclysms, as they leave sudden death, out of their calculations. And we do not know that they are wrong. A flood which sweeps away a city seems an awful thing to the on-looker who thinks of thousands at once, but it is to the single sufferer only equivalent to a fire, which may happen to any individual. He might be drowned without a flood. In- surance will guard the property, care will guard the dykes, and the chance of a violent death to a dweller in Szegedin marsh is probably not arithmetically greater by any perceptible fraction than the chance to a dweller anywhere else. His prospect of drowning must be a minute fraction, compared with the pro- stpect of any captain of a coasting collier, and the wharfingers have no difficulty in finding captains for their rotten hulls. No fear of fire deeply alarms a great city, though most great cities would burn, and a great fire would be by many degrees worse than a great flood. The Great Fire of London made a deep impression on Charles II.'s generation, but the impression was not one of fear of great fires, which were risked just as much after the calamity as before, and no more provided against than the recurrence of the great storm of a century ago, which shook the minds of that generation more than any calamity is ever known to have done. The human mind, in truth, accepts these great cataclysmal dangers as part of the order of things, and by a beneficial instinct refuses to consider them, or to waste energy in an insurance which may be all in vain. An inhabitant of Szegedin may be drowned, and so may any other person, and the fact that if he is drowned Szegedin will be drowned too, does not increase to his mind either the proximity or the magnitude of his risk. One Szegediner has but one life, and so Szegedin, what with subscriptions, and grants, and drafts on the inhabitants' hoards—for their farm-houses are outside the flood—will be rebuilt, probably to be destroyed again, for the inhabitants are not rich enough to rebuild on piles, or we fear, to cut the mighty reservoirs and build the lined canals which would enable them on a stormy night like that of the 12th inst. to carry off the overplus of the waters. Strengthen- ing the dykes is no final precaution, for when that is done, the bed of the river always rises, and the floods become even more dangerous and severe. Nothing but new channels for the water is of any use, and the expense of building them in a marshy delta, without a stone in it, to the needful height, would probably be too great even for the wealthy munici- pality which Szegedin, if it were made tolerably safe, ought to become. Even France has not regulated her rivell.s yet, though Napoleon said it "concerned his honour that rivers, like revolutions, should keep within their banks,"— and Hungary is to France as Shadwell to Belgravia. Money granted, the Austrian engineers or Sir John Hawkshaw would soon render Szegedin fairly safe ; but the State is poor just now, and a city just swept away is in no condition to mortgage its future industry. The old expedient of raising the dykes will, we imagine, be continued, and some day a new Finance Minister will be scolded as M. Szapary has been, not for not cutting chan- nels for the overplus of water, but for not providing boats to carry away the people. The want of boats, not the condition of the hull, is always the first popular complaint, when a ship gets water-logged.
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