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. [From "The Pall Mall Gazette," January 19, 1871.] _A NATION'S DEFENCES._ _To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_