e or two about those great rivers, because in
the efforts that are now being made to restore some of its commerce to
Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again
and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at
pause--namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass
formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange
that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending
with those rivers at their _mouths_--that is to say, where their
strength has become wholly irresistible--and never once thought of
contending with them at their sources, where their infinitely separated
streamlets might be, and are meant by Heaven to be, ruled as easily as
children? And observe how sternly, how constantly the place where they
are to be governed is marked by the mischief done by their liberty.
Consider what the advance of the delta of the Po in the Adriatic
signifies among the Alps. The evil of the delta itself, however great,
is as nothing in comparison of that which is in its origin.

240. "The gradual destruction of the harborage of Venice, the endless
cost of delaying it, the malaria of the whole coast down to Ravenna,
nay, the raising of the bed of the Po, to the imperiling of all
Lombardy, are but secondary evils. Every acre of that increasing delta
means _the devastation of part of an Alpine valley, and the loss of so
much fruitful soil and ministering rain_. Some of you now present must
have passed this year through the valleys of the Toccia and Ticino. You
know therefore the devastation that was caused there, as well as in the
valley of the Rhone, by the great floods of 1868, and that ten years of
labor, even if the peasantry had still the heart for labor, cannot
redeem those districts into fertility. What you have there seen on a
vast scale takes place to a certain extent during every summer
thunderstorm, and from the ruin of some portion of fruitful land the
dust descends to increase the marshes of the Po. But observe
further--whether fed by sudden melting of snow or by storm--every
destructive rise of the Italian rivers signifies the loss of so much
power of irrigation on the south side of the Alps. You must all well
know the look of their chain--seen from Milan or Turin late in
summer--how little snow is left, except on Monte Rosa, how vast a
territory of brown mountain-side heated and barren, without rocks, yet
without forest. There