To the Editor of the “Daily Telegraph”

Sir,—May I ask you to add to your article on the inundation of the Tiber some momentary invitation to your readers to think with Horace rather than to smile with him?

In the briefest and proudest words he wrote of himself he thought of his native land chiefly as divided into the two districts of violent and scanty waters:

Now the anger and power of that “tauriformis Aufidus” is precisely because “regna Dauni præfluit”—because it flows past the poor kingdoms which it should enrich. Stay it there, and it is treasure instead of ruin. And so also with Tiber and Eridanus. They are so much gold, at their sources,— they are so much death, if they once break down unbridled into the plains.

At the end of your report of the events of the inundation, it is said that the King of Italy expressed “an earnest desire to do something, as far as science and industry could effect it, to prevent or mitigate inundations for the future”

Now science and industry can do, not “something” but everything, and not merely to mitigate inundations—and, deadliest of inundations, because perpetual, maremmas—but to change them into national banks instead of debts.