TOPICS.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12475, 27 February 1909, Page 1

TOPICS.

THE GREAT CITIES. Few of the world's great cities have not faced, at one time or another, total destruction. But a city is, hard to kill. . _ Take Rome, for instance. She. has heen swept by pestilence no fewer • than ten times. She has been twice burned and six times driven to submission by starvation. Perhaps it is on account of her vitality that she is called the Eternal city. Paris has gone through eight seiges ten famines, two ;plagues 3 and one fire, which devastated it. Constantinople has been burned out nine times and has suffered from four plagues and five sieges. In addition, she has been ruled by monarchs who were worse than a plague. Yet Constantinople still flourishes. London has-been decimated nvo times by plague, in addition to visitations "of typhus, cholera, and other epidemics. She has been burned more or less severely several times.