tury of effort on our sand-dune peninsula are not lost.
Earthquakes cannot destroy them; fire cannot burn them. San Francisco
grew from the Yerba Buena hamlet in sixty years. In a new and untried
field city-building then was something of an experiment; yet population
grew to half a million, and wealth in proportion; and never was
improvement so marked as just before the fire. With wealth and
population but little impaired, and with the ground cleared for new
constructive work, there would be nothing strange in a city here of
three or four millions of people in another sixty years. Actual progress
has scarcely been arrested. We are rudely hustled and awake to higher
and severer effort. No house or store or factory or business will be
rebuilt or established except in a larger and more efficient way, and
that is progress.

In and around the city are already more people than were here before the
fire, and soon there will be twice as many, for from every quarter
are coming mechanics and business men, attracted by high wages and the
material requirements of the city. Hundreds of millions of money from
the insurance companies and from local and outside capitalists are
finding safe and profitable investment. And this is only the beginning.

San Francisco is already a large manufacturing city; it will be many
times larger. Around its several hundred miles of bay shore and up the
Carquinez strait will be thousands of industries to-day not dreamed of,
and all ministering to the necessities of the thousand cities of
the Pacific. There is no place in the world better adapted for
manufacturing. All sorts of raw material can be gathered here from every
quarter of the earth at small cost, lumber, coal, iron, wool, and cotton
for a hundred factories, and mineral ores for reduction. Likewise labor
at a minimum wage, congress and the lords of labor permitting. Add to
these advantages a climate cool in summer and warm in winter, where
work can be comfortably carried on every day in the year, and a more
desirable spot cannot be found.

Industrially San Francisco should dominate the Pacific, its firm land
and islands, upon whose borders is to be found more natural wealth,
mineral and agricultural, than upon those of all the other waters of the
earth combined, and the exploitation of which has scarcely begun. Here
in abundance are every mineral and metal, rich and varied soils, all
fruits and native products, fuels and forests, for some of