Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1881-08-29
ST Petersburg asItIs.

Correspondence Of the London Times.
What town it is! How large. how
dismally empty How it squats like an
immense alligator half in and half out of
a swamp, modelled on Amsterdam and
reminding one of Venicel What miles
and miles of prospects," or, as the
French would say, "bOulevards;' what
endless succession of wide, open spaces
and magnificent distances, of long
straight lines of walls and rows of trees
aud interminable avenues, cOntrived,
as it were, to allow the town
ample room to run out of town
A city of churches, converts and
palaces, of steeples and monuments,
of gold, bronze, granite and marble, of
buildings in all styles, European and
AsiGtic, quaint originals, OF Indifferent
copies, many Of them grand and massive,
yet strewn over space at haphazard, on
a perfectly fiat surface, grouping no
where, nowhere laid out for effect or
with an eye to the picturesque. A town
of princes, to all appearance, or of
wealthy bankers or traders, with nothing
mean, no back slums, no rag fair; the
homes of the poor, if at all existing,
carefully hidden out of sight; the whole
covering scores of miles of ground, a
maze of isles and islets, of bridges and
embankments, of river, and branches of
river and canals.
IL is a town made by one man, made
on plan and for a purpose; and when
that is said ali is said. 1t was not one of
the cities of Gods own building; conse-
quently, it may be feared, not one of those
that abide Its foundation was suggest
ed by great thought. and it turns out
now to have been a mistake.
1t is questionable. indeed, whether
Peter the Great ever meant ST. Peters
burg for a permanent court residence
and capital As late as 1924, seven
months before his death, it was not here,
but at Moscow that he celebrated the
coronation Of his wife Catherine; and if
he spent much Of his time on this spot,
it was chiefly because q work of such
magnitude as he had undertaken requir-
ed the masters inceSsant presence. For
the rest, all that Peter wanted here was
a port. and he could under the circum-
stances find no better He built on con-
quered ground out of all the boundaries
of Old Russia, amid Finnish population,
the former subjects of Sweden. He
drafted his wOTkmen among the serfs of
all his prov noes, and wasted 100. 900
human lives in the achievement, labor
being as cheap for him as it ever was for
the builders of the Egyptian pyramids.
The site was a swamp-an unhealthy
swamp, so unsafe that some Of its finest
mOnuments-the mOnOlith column of
Alexander |. and the Isaac church-shOw
in their deep crevices the rapid decay OF
which the treacheTOus ground beneath is
booming them; so unsafe. besides, as to be
subject to inundatiOns like the ground of
ancient Rome, for the city has already
been destructively flooded eight times
since 1903, the date of its
foundation, and even last year the
water rose more than ten feet above the
ordinary level, driving people from their
cellars and basement floors, as well as
from the villas and gardens Of the lower
islands. There were even for many
years Ominous speculatiOns as to the pos
sibility of the whole town being sub
merged. The Gulf of Finland" Peter
reasoned, "runs westward from St
Peter burg, in the direction whence the
heaviest storms always blow. Imagine
torm to set in from the west, in April
or May, when the ice Is breaking up, and
suppose that this should happen just
when the water in the river is at the
highest. The masses of ice blown in
from the sea would meet those that float
down from the land side, and the col
lisiOn between the two opposite masses
could not fail to Overwhelm the whole
CITY. with its proud palaces, when princes
and beggarS would be drowned prOmis-
cuously, like Pharaoh and his host in
the Red Sea"
The town, however. has already stood
one hundred and seventy-eight years,
and the catastrophe seems indefinitely ad-
iOurned. AS no such combination of
storm, high water and great thaw as
crOakers cOnjured up has yet occurred,
sanguine people have become perfectly
skeptical as to the possibility of the
dreaded contingency