SAN FRANCISCO.
THROUGHOUT the past ten days the dominant note of the news from San Francisco has been one of uncon- querable optimism. It is true that as regards the exact amount of damage done by fire and earthquake the earlier reports turn out to have been a little exaggerated. In the roar of confusion which followed the smashing of the telegraph- wires, it was stated that nothing could save the whole city, which was being left to burn itself out. According to later reports, the prodigious efforts of the soldiers and the fire brigade have saved a large number of buildings, some of which, indeed, especially the steel-framed houses, seem after all to have been very little affected; they were elastic enough to sway to the motion of the ground instead of shuddering to pieces. But there is no question of the colossal general ruin. The loss of life is not, almost certainly never will be, known
exactly ; but with the dregs of the population fighting madly among themselves, and the Chinese too numb with fright to move from where they lay, the number of deaths must have been thousands. As to the loss of property, insurance claims alone are expected to amount to thirty millions ; the direct and indirect losses not covered by insurance probably greatly exceed that total; the sum of private miseries must, of course, remain immeasurable.
Yet the salient fact is the immediate decision to rebuild, to resume again the ordinary routine of life as soon as human effort can make it possible, upon the same spot, under the same skies, on the very foundations even which lie with their superstructures in dust above them. The city is a city of paupers, huddled in tents on open spaces, unable, indeed, to get at food if it were not for the hundreds of trains bearing flour and meat sent stringing westward by the money of New York and the other great American communities. Money means nothing, for the moment, in San Francisco, simply because nobody has anything to sell. Yet the great business firms are giving their orders for steel and stone and wood, and meetings of prominent citizens are being held with the intention of making the rebuilt town the most beautiful city in the world. • Is it reasoned decision, or mere impulse, which underlies that sudden determination ? Are the chances of a recurring disaster weighed ? and if so, is it decided that never again will the great buildings totter down or the business houses be subjected to the tremendous drain on their resources entailed by so huge an upheaval? It is unimaginable that any firm deciding to rebuild its business house could contem- plate a second earthquake to-morrow. If there is reasoning, it would seem to be that, what has only happened once will not happen again. The earthquake of 1868, in the words of one of the sufferers, "was nothing more than the rocking of a child's cradle," as compared with the earthquake of 1806. "There is no record of a great city having been twice destroyed by convulsion or eruption; the earth will not heave again, or, if it does, it will be at a time so distant that the contingency need not be considered." And so the plans go forward ; work is to begin at once on the water-front, where there are to be new wharves and new depots, arranged on entirely new lines, to cost• 25,000,000; enthusiasm has caught at the idea of thoroughness ; there are to be broad new boulevards and terraces, new parks, and a reorganised system of electric light- ing. All that is to spring into being with the chance, existent, if for the moment disregarded, that before the harbour wharves have received their first burden another cataclysm may be cracking the girders of the city's balls, crunching into waste millions' worth of labour about the ears of the still toiling builders.
Yet, if all the arguments are pressed home, the outstanding conclusion must be the essential sanity of the decision which determines upon reconstruction in the face of all hazards. For what are the alternatives ? The' insistent need in the first moment of panic must have seemed to be a place of refuge from shooting flame and crashing walls. But how is a place of refuge to be found for three hundred thousand men and women ? The very numbers of the population make transplantation on so huge a scale impossible; you cannot dump down in a-single spot, or even distribute, hundreds of thousands without dislocating, perhaps paralysing, other systems. Then, again, if flight is decided upon, in which direction is safety to be sought ? Away from the latitudes in which earthquakes tear down cities ? But can those latitudes
• be limited ? For, remember, the knowledge possessed by man of the causes and phenomena of convulsions . of the earth's surface is, and will possibly always remain, extremely small,— almost paltry, indeed, except that men have devoted, their lives to trying to guess at the main laws of seismology, and that knowledge of a particular subject ought not to be called paltry if there is a probability that it is never likely to be much increased. All that can be said to be known, that is, apparently rightly reasoned from certain premisses, is that the planet on which we live has cooled down from a glowing mass of molten matter, and is still cooling ; that during the lapse of unnumbered and innumerable aeons the
almost cold crust has clothed itself with the power of giving and supporting life ; and that of all living beings it has been ordained that man alone shall be able to understand and reason about the vast laws of his existence. He is allowed to build huge cities where he pleases, to carve the thin stone under him to pile up palaces a hundred feet high, with more than forty million feet of unknowable matter between him and his fellow palace-builder the other side of the globe. Beneath the ground he treads, it may be but one short mile away, huge forces wake and sleep, move and are still; some unseen power shifts uneasily, writhes and rolls, and the caked coating above quakes as a bog-crust might shiver over a buried bull. Under which spot of all the surface over which he may roam will the monster writhe next ? He cannot tell that ; he knows only that here and there, during the few hundred years of which he has record, may be found tracts of land which hitherto have not been shaken, or have been shaken only slightly. What he does not know is whether the same laws which have hitherto prevailed can be counted on to prevail for the future. And if he does not know that—if, that is, he cannot stamp his foot on a square yard of ground and say, Here at least it is certain that the earth will never be riven—is it not just as sane to rebuild where buildings have been shattered as, to build afresh where no buildings have stood ? The Scots builder, planning a new hotel within sight of Arthur's Seat, knows from the teaching of geology that it was so many thousand years ago that the rock on which Edinburgh Castle is founded was hurled up from the plain. What he cannot tell is that a like cataclysm shall never shake Scottish fields. The risk is there for all builders on the thin surface; the laws of its variance have not yet been coded.
The builder will face that risk in his own way. He may watch his houses overwhelmed by the resistless march of lava, and with easy fatalism the next day sip wine over their ruins. Or, with the alert sanity of a nation buoyant in her belief in her mission of work, he may set himself with steady energy to make better what was good before, to use his broken buildings to teach himself lessons of knitting more soundly stone and steel and wood, to set together a new city, greater, compacter, and cleaner than the old. That is the task which has been set the San Franciscans by the genius of the great nation to which they belong. It is the genius of the American nation to grasp essential points, to rise greater than calamities, as though calamities gave wings or spurs ; the greater the need for decision and courage, the greater capacity emerges for bravery and action. The descendant of the colonists who faced a new world with fresh thought and untired arms, in the crash of misfortune
"Turns his keen, untroubled face
Home to the instant need of things."
With the deep sympathy that has been felt by the English- speaking race for the sufferers in. the ordeal of the last ten days there is yet mixed a high pride in the recognition of the qualities of cool steadfastness, courage, and strength which have nerved those who have sustained the greatest losses, and which are admired above and beyond other great and abiding qualities by their kinsmen.
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