FLOODS
Go up every day at this season on some hill such as Chanctonbury; overlooking the levels of the Sussex Adur, or Winter Hill above the middle Thames, and the likeness to a snake of the passive stream becomes in time some- thing more than a resemblance of form. One day you see the brute lying there in sullen coils under a grey sky-; the next it is plainly swelling itself for mischief, and a little more rain sends it writhing over -the land, acres of swallowed water-meadow giving it a bulge in the neck like an adder that has gulped down a large frog. Down below, at the locks, men are bleeding the monster to death with open sluices, but so long as the clouds give support its spreading coils are invincible ; it trickles down all the grassy hollows and cuts off the rising ground before that also is devoured, it eats fields of growing crops and invades the new bungalows of foolish, town-bred men, who have liVed so long -artificially; out of contact with Nature, that they have forgotten all about her power. - • ConServators and Drainage Boards have long struggled • against this inconvenient self-assertiveneSs of the- rivers, but their victories have been indecisive and - far from spectacular. In a landscape which contains only a few -scattered acres of natural forest, where every rod, pole or perch that could be turned to the purpoSes of cultivation has been • cUltivated as long and assiduOusly as an old garden; the rivers still uphold their prescriptive right, .dating from the age of the prehistoric swamps, to over- run their. neighbour territory as often as they.feel inclined. -They will not be conformable to our civilization..
• • We, for -many hundreds of years, wisely placed-our • homes outside the debatable land; Everyone knows how scarce are ancient buildings standing on a site at the mercy- of the floods. But when the Age of Science arrived people no longer bothered themselves -about these old- fashioned limitations. It was nice by the river in summer, and no place that was thought pleasant could escape their profane bungalows. The. floods still co-me up- as they have always been accustomed to, and when the river-dwellers complain to the proper authority they are informed in a vast number of words that the. Reign of Science is only a limited monarchy; after .the pattern of King Canute's. This explanation never really satisfies them. There is still the sludge in the drawing-room to be got rid of, and they cannot understand why it should be possible to harness Niagara and not possible to bridle the Adur or the Little Ouse.
. _They -demand at the same time the picturesque beauty of a free river and the tractability of a canal. They may hate the discomfort of the floods, but at bottom what they resent more than anything is their own impotence against the river. We may not fight one another so much now, but we fight ferOcionsly against things that harass us and used to be taken for granted, as the inevitable , troubles of life. What actually drops .upon us from the clouds,---rain, hail, snow and tempests—is still accepted in the old philosophic spirit, but that anything like a river should defy our jurisdiction is monstrous and not to be 'borne. It is not many centuries since we timidly "disputed Nature's supreinacy over -trifles': now, in England, we take her utter submission for granted. Nothing but lack of funds prevents a great effort being • made to subjugate the rivers also. They are Nature's last stronghold against man in this eountry, holding out so long after the rest have surrendered that it seems no -longer a magnificent resistance against the tamers of-the • world but an impertinence to be suppressed even if their courses have to be made straight to secure it. So far as wild life is concerned, we have done our worst already. It is not the river itself but the backwaters and pools and swampy areas adjoining it which give safest harbour to creatures of all kinds. Nothing is so secure from disturbance as a good morass : it is penetrable neither dryshod nor in the lightest boat, and few human trespassers will defy the risks and discomforts of the reedy wilderness. But most of these places have been drained and turned into water-meadoWs, like Amberley Wildbrooks in Sussex, where the bittern and bearded tit and swallowtail butterfly flourished.well into last century. --They have been won from the river, and yet not a tithe of them are kept adequately drained, so that they can be -devoted to our use. They are the famous drowned acres, and in England alone there are certainly over a million of them. For all' the use they are, quite a third of these chronically Waterlogged levels might as well be handed back to thebittern : but a country which imports such -fabulous quantities. of ordinary foodstuffs might be expeetedta Sad-a better use than that for thern. .4Their condition has little to do with the floods : they are chronic and permanent like marshes, but the floods come up only once in a while and then notfor long. To the inhuman eye of a field-naturalist these drowned acres seem more utterly waste than any others in the country. When ploughland goes derelict, as so much of it has done,- the larks and partridges may be lost, but snakes andwhitethroats and many small creatures flourish in the- encroaching brambles, and he sees a marvellous exchange of fanna and flora Where the agriculturist sees only_ dead-loss. Even those ominous sheets of thistles which cover many once golden acres are the paradise of the goldfinch. Where the Office of Works can_ plant a little patch of teazle to. entice them to London .on rare occasions the morelavish hand of a decaying agriculture gives them thistles not in clumps but by the hundred acres. And all that-figures as waste land in 'the Census returns, heather moor, gorse common, even a tract of shingle, is not waste to the naturalist, but often an -out- standing hunting-ground. But the drowned acres are almost pure waste : though lapwings and golden plover winter on them and birds of a good many species haunt them pretty freely, they would bear a better crop of larks if they were properly drained and farmed, or of bitterns, otters and aquatic plants if they were allowed to relapse (as they are gradually- relapsing' now) -to the condition feroxpinense. which they were reclaimed at so much trouble and
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