quakings at some time in its
history.

To one who knows the people and the country, the people with their
magnificent energy and ability, their indomitable will and their
splendid courage; the country with its boundless natural wealth and
illimitable potentialities; the city, key to the Golden Gate, which
opens the East to the West and West to East; the bay, mistress primeval,
through which flows the drainage of six hundred miles in length of
interior valley, the garden of the world; to one who has here lived and
loved, assisting in this grand upbuilding, thoughts of relinquishment,
of lesser possibilities, of meaner efforts, do not come.

What would you? If there is a spot on earth where life and property are
safer, where men are more enterprising and women more intelligent and
refined, where business is better or fortunes more safely or surely
made, the world should know of it. The earth may tremble now and then,
but houses may be built which cannot be destroyed, fires are liable
to occur wherever material exists that will burn, but fires may be
controlled.

As for the city, its life and destiny, there is this to be said. The few
square miles of buildings burned were not San Francisco, they were only
buildings. Were every house destroyed and every street obliterated,
there would still remain the city, with its commerce, its manufactures,
its civilization, a spiritual city if you like, yet with material values
incapable of destruction--an atmosphere alive with cheerful industry;
also land values, commercial relations, financial connections, skilled
laborers and professional men, and a hundred other like souls of things.
In a thousand ideas and industries, though the ground is but ashes, the
spirit of progress still hovers over the hills awaiting incarnation.
Dependent on this pile of ashes, or the ghosts thereof, are fleets of
vessels sailing every sea; farms and factories along shore and back to
and beyond the Sierra; merchants and mechanics here and elsewhere; mines
and reclamation systems, and financial relations the world over.

The question now is not as to the existence or permanency of a central
city on the shores of San Francisco bay. That fact was established
beyond peradventure with the building of the bay, and nothing short of
universal cataclysm can affect it. It is rather to the quality of
that city that the consideration of the present generation should
be directed. The shell has been injured, but the