do not roast a tribe of aborigines in a cave, as has been done in Africa in our own time. Men are not now burned at the stake for their opinions,—unless in some of the American Slave States and in Cochin-China. Kings and courtiers do not dress up in skins and pitch for a masquerading dance, and catch fire from torches, like the unhappy Charles VI. of France, and writhe in the torture of the damned. Yet it may be doubted whether a larger proportion of the present generation does not die by fire than in the ruder times of old.
Up to this Midsummer we should have said that we were past the danger of such conflagrations as the Fire of London: but to-day men speak less confidently of that than they would have done at any time in their lives before. It seems to be agreed now that a very slight change of circumstances might have laid London (the city) or Southwark low at Midsummer 1861. We have witnessed several great fires within one generation. The Hamburg fire is of itself a warning against security in modern civilisation. Where wooden houses or thatched roofs are in use,—in Russia, in Norway, in Switzerland, in the French provinces, in our colonies, and in outlying, villages in our own counties, great fires are always happening somewhere. We do not forget the monstrous Canadian fires, making a clean sweep of the lower part of Quebec, and of half or a third of a town, here and there. St. John’s, New Brunswick, is subject to fires almost periodically, like an individual here and there who has a terrible fever every seven or ten years. The two New York fires of a quarter of a century ago will never be dimmed in their impression on the minds of those who witnessed either of them.
There are many persons now living who say that no desolation that ever they witnessed can compare with the scene when those fifty-three acres of calcined ruins lay crumbling, after the smoke had at length gone out. In the midst of the white, powdery heaps of ruin, stood up aloft a singularly ugly building;—a tall and narrow fire-proof warehouse, with iron doors, behind which was a store of hay, absolutely unsinged. By this token, our Tooley Street fire was more severe; for fire-proof warehouses, with their double iron doors, were overpowered at last;—the walls and floors calcined and the doors red hot, so that nothing behind them could be preserved. It should be remembered that civilisation may intensify fire as much in one direction as it restricts it in another. Two centuries ago, narrow streets of wooden houses caught like rows of gas jets, blazed up, and were soon mere heaps of wood-ashes; and the more substantial warehouses contained nothing like the mass of combustible substances that our modern commerce accumulates in one place. Probably, no port in the world then held so much tallow as choked the sewers, and flooded the streets, and blazed across i the river at the Tooley Street fire, and went on burning in the vaults after it: and oils were a rare commodity in the days of the Stuarts to what they are now.
We cannot but perceive also that there is something much more barbarous and shocking in the deaths yet known at this recent fire than in the few which happen when slight wooden houses or rows of thatched cottages are consumed. Men in boats burned on the Thames like moths in a candle, are a worse spectacle than we had fancied ourselves exposed to in these days. The flame spreading as the ignited tallow or oil spread over the surface, till it surrounded a boat filled with tallow, and set fire to it; the men in the boat, doomed and seeing their doom, but plunging overboard into one sheet of burning grease to avoid the same agony within the boat;—this sight of horror, witnessed by the glare from the shore, could not be surpassed by any spectacle of old days,—nor equalled, unless by the vindictiveness of war, which drove back enemies into a burning house at the point of the lance.
Whenever there have been conflagrations, there have been deaths by crushing under walls; but the massive walls which we build as a protection against fire are more dangerous than the wooden erections of our fathers, and make a more total destruction when overthrown. In a region of log or frame-houses, Mr. Braidwood would not have perished as he did: but then, again, such a man would not have been engaged in his special duty. In the newly settled American States, and also in Swiss villages, where wooden dwellings and stores exist, the proceeding, in an alarm of fire, is to pull down the logs or planks with hooks, and put out the fire, or let it burn piecemeal. When we build massive walls, in fire-proof warehouses, we do what we can to repel the calamity of fire; but if the fire once gets the upper hand, the danger from the walls is greater than ever before.
There is an air of fatality about such an incident which reminds one of the revolting accumulation of calamity which renders fire after an earthquake or a railway accident so horrible; or, I may add, a conflagration in an American forest or prairie or on a Russian steppe. We are given to understand—and we scarcely need to be told it—that there is a feeling of despair, a sensation of being hunted by fate, in such circumstances which is, of all human experiences, the most terrible. When the earthquake has levelled every house, and imprisoned the inhabitants in the ruins, the worst has yet to come. Fire bursts forth wherever air penetrates, and consumes the life and property that the convulsion had left. At Mendoza, a few weeks since, this was the surpassing horror, as it was in the great Lisbon earthquake.
Most of us remember the railway accident between Versailles and Paris, nearly twenty years ago; and the prominent image in that terrible scene is still the lady—name unknown—who perished in full view of a crowd who could do nothing to help her. She was fixed by the waist (apparently without pain) between two parts of a carriage, and when she became aware that fire was the danger, she at first called wildly for help. When she saw that it could not be rendered, and when her light scarf caught and flickered away, she gave one gaze upward, buried her face in her hands, and stirred no more. Many times since has fire followed the crash of collision till it is naturally almost the most dreaded of the two.
Perhaps even these are not such appalling events at the moment to the sufferers as a forest