The Aegis & Intelligencer

Or be Lisbon in the last century, or Pittsburg and Chicago tossed from their foundations like the wealthy cities of the Calabrian plain? Must San Francisco become a new Callao, and sink into a mound of sand beneath the raging waves of the treacherous Pacific? If we have ever for a moment entertained such fears, history at once reassures us. History, mother of science, points to the unchanging unity of nature. Man and his creations vary, fade, and die.— Great empires fall before moral revolutions; wealthy cities sink into solitudes with the revulsion of commerce and the alterations in the course of trade; nations that were once strong in intellect and vigorous with the element of progress have become the prey of savages and barbarians; and all that is human is liable to change.— Not so the Divine work. The laws of nature are immutable. From age to age the monsoons have blown across the Indian seas, and the Gulf stream pierced the Atlantic with its tepid wave; the stars rise and set as they did of old; the seasons come with their wonted regularity, and summer feeds us every year as it fed the Assyrians and the Greeks; the ocean keeps its appointed bounds; the tides ebb and flow with calm monotony; and the great sun, whether gas or fire, cloud or comet, is always the same to us. And hence history assures us that even the terrible earthquake is bound by the unchanging laws of nature to a single path, from which it is not permitted to diverge.

And history marks out upon the map of the world where that path lies. It is one so nicely defined and delicately drawn as to produce the most striking distinctions; yet it is as clear as the Gulf-stream and regular as the monsoons. Rome and Naples, for example, lie close to the path of the earthquake, and have been subject to slight shocks for centuries, yet they are probably as safe as London or Paris; Messina lies above the path, and has been torn by frequent convulsions. It winds sinuously under the seas, visiting certain islands with disaster and wholly sparing others. It penetrates to the northern latitude of Niphon Kamchatka, and the Arctic mountains: it reaches to Lower California. Yet San Francisco is as safe as Rome or Florence, and the North Pacific shore as the coast of England. History, in fact, assures us that ours is not of the lands of earthquake: that our exemption from its terrors is as certain as that the seasons will not vary or the summer fail to come; that maternal nature has sheltered us from the destroyer that we may enjoy her gifts at leisure and unfold her vast resources by incessant toil; and that He who holds the earthquake in check has ordained that we may do his work unimpeded by the perpetual horror that broods over other lands.—

LAWRENCE, in Harper's Magazine.