What Next?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 3, 1872

THERE is a grim sort of consolation in the fact that if we are just now suffering from a combination of calamities, such as great fires, the horse disease, a stringent money market, heavy taxes, and various social disorders, we are not alone in our misery. All the powers of evil and forces of disaster seem to be let loose at once in Europe, and with a fury which is almost sufficient to make one believe that Satan has been unchained, and is coming on his thousand years of havoc. The cable dispatches in our last issue present a catalogue of horrors, the bare enumeration of which is enough to make the reader a settled hypochondriac. First, a terrible storm sweeps along the English coast, wrecking everything within its reach, and involving a sad loss of life. The same gale ravaged the Prussian coast. If the damage to shipping was less severe, it was only because the merchantmen are not so numerous as on the English coast. What it failed to do on the sea, however, it more than accomplished on shore. The ancient and quaint old town of Stralsund, which has borne the brunt of nearly all the old German wars, which was besieged by Wallenstein in 1628, bombarded in 1678, and nearly destroyed by Frederick William, the great Elector of Brandenburg, and captured again after desperate struggles, in 1713 and 1807, seems to have come in for more than its share of this terrible natural convulsion. Twelve vessels were sunk in the shallows of its harbor. The whole town was inundated, and then, to add to the general horror, a great fire broke out, destroying many of the largest warehouses and other buildings, as well as many lives. Those in the interior have fared little better. For several days, an unusually severe rain and snow storm has prevailed in eastern Germany, prostrating the telegraph wires in every direction, and doing wide-spread damage by flooding the country.

Lubeck, the famous commercial city of Germany, close by Hamburg, and the former meeting place of the Hanseatic League, has suffered like Stralsund, and all its principal buildings are under water. The coal mines of Staffordshire add a melancholy item to the general tidings of disaster, one of them being suddenly inundated, while the miners were at work, twenty-two of them perished miserably.

The South Sea Islands furnish the last and most fearful story of all, in which “man’s inhumanity to man” dwarfs all the desolation by fire and storm. An English vessel was on a kidnapping expedition among the islands. The unsuspecting natives were decoyed alongside the vessel, when their canoes were smashed. The wretched victims were fished out of the water, and thrust into the hold of the vessel. They fought for their liberty, and, to secure it, set fire to the vessel, and then the captain and crew commenced firing into them indiscriminately. The next morning the hatches were removed, seventy were found either dead or wounded, and the wounded and dead were thrown overboard together. It is hard to believe that human nature can be guilty of such atrocious crimes, but one man in the crowd of barbarous wretches has had conscience enough to turn Queen’s evidence, and it is to be hoped that the latest development of English barbarity not only will meet with the most inexorable administration of English justice, but will serve to help on the movement already commenced in England to punish and prevent kidnapping into slavery, and enlist the cooperation of other European nations in the good work.

The inevitable question which will occur to every reader as he peruses this dismal list of horrors, is, “What next?” What calamity or combination of calamities is to come to-day or to-morrow? What fresh evils have the revengeful fates in store for the world, already groaning under its heavy burdens? Just as the great wars were over, and all the nations of the earth were settled peacefully down to industrial and commercial pursuits, and the two leading powers had set a joyful example to the rest by settling their disputes amicably, all the powers of fire, air, and water, seem to be let loose, with no restraint upon their capabilities for mischief. Earthquakes swallow up the cities of the plain. The pestilence set forth upon its devastating march, and not even the dumb beasts escape its influences. Volcanoes rain storms of fire upon the villages below, and consume them. Vast and terrible conflagrations lay low great cities and forests in a night. Whirlwinds destroy rural villages and the labors of the husbandman, floods submerge the accumulations of the merchants, and gales sweep the coasts of their shipping. The lightning in its wrath spares neither the Escurial, with its buried kings, nor the remotest country hamlet. There is only one consolation attaching to this general havoc, and that is, we are gradually becoming accustomed to it, and may soon be able to endure it, and, perhaps, enjoy it with a certain degree of philosophy. At present, however, the world is as pitiable as poor old Lear, out on the barred heath, with nothing to protect him from the pitiless storms. * * * * —Chicago Tribune.