“When the shriekers of calamity are able to harness the prosperity of the country and turn it against the Government; when the beneficiaries of a great policy turn against it and vote it down; when those who lick the cream of good times, hunger and thirst for experimental changes; when opposing interests and factions, principles and purposes, personalities and all the potencies of all the fads, can be united for a common purpose, there are surprises for citizens who have held in a commonplace way, but the unreasonable and inconsistent, the unwarrantable and the illogical, must also be the impracticable. “It has been remarked of St. Petersburg, that in case of the occurrence of, first, a great flood in the Neva; second, extraordinary high tide; third, a long, strong blow from the gulf, the city must be overwhelmed. The years, the decades, and the centuries come and go without the disaster. It was long understood in the Ohio valley that there would be a flood beating all in history, and competing with Indian tradition, if there happened, in the order set down, these events: (1) during a wintry night, a sudden general rain, followed quickly by a freeze, covering Western New York and Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, West North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana with a sheet of ice; (2) if, upon this vast glassy surface, there should fall a series of heavy snows; (3) if, upon the snow, there should come rain, beginning near the Mississippi, which should be full and filling all the streams, locking them from the mouths against speedy discharge; (4) and if there followed rain-storms for a week, so distributed as to boom all the rivers in order from west to east; (5) culminating with three tremendous downpours over all the mountain regions, sweeping from the glazed earth the whole accumulation of snows, and so timed as to tumble all the floods at once into the Ohio, whose channel has been obstructed by the piers of many bridges, and a habit of encroaching upon it, then the river would make a demonstration memorable and marvelous. All this took place, just as we have set it down, five winters ago, and the high-water-mark at Cincinnati is seventy feet above low-water-mark. Up to this, the boast of the old folks in the valley was, that they had seen ‘the flood of ’32,’ and there could never be anything like it. The world did not now-a-days afford such spectacles as they had beheld in ’32! A few dingy old houses had incredible high-water ’32 marks upon it. If the river looked angry, and rushed through a few low streets, the veterans would say: ‘You should have seen the flood of ’32. ’Twas the biggest thing we ever had, or ever will have. But they do say the Indians