of its fireproof vaults and remained practically unharmed, so far as
credit was concerned.

For a number of days it was impossible to open any strong boxes on
account of the great heat which the thick walls retained, and this
naturally caused some embarrassment and lack of ready money. Nearly all
of them, however, had strong connections in Eastern cities and large
balances to their credit in other banks of America and Europe. They
were also favored by the fact that the United States Mint and the
Sub-Treasury held between them some $245,000,000 in ready money. The
Secretary of the Treasury immediately deposited $10,000,000 to the
credit of the local banks, and financiers of the great business centres
of the country added to public confidence by prompt statements that they
would facilitate the reconstruction of the city by a liberal advancement
of funds.

One prominent Eastern capitalist expressed the general conviction in the
following words:

"No great city, unless it dried up entirely from lack of commercial life
blood, was ever annihilated by such a disaster as that of San Francisco.
Pompeii and Herculaneum were not great cities in the first place, and in
the second, they were completely covered, smothered as it were, with the
ashes and molten lava of the adjoining volcano, and nearly all of
their inhabitants perished. If it be admitted that three-fourths of the
superstructures, so to speak, of San Francisco, estimated according to
valuation, is destroyed, we have yet the fact remaining that the lives
of only about one four-hundredth of its population have been lost.

"San Francisco was not merely land and the buildings erected upon
it, but it was people, and one of the most active, most hopeful, most
vivacious human communities on the face of the earth. You cannot long
discourage such a community, unless you wipe out three-fourths of
its members. Will San Francisco rise again? Most certainly it will.
Galveston and Baltimore, not to mention Charleston, Boston and Chicago,
showed the spirit of material resurrection in American communities,
sore-smitten by calamity. After Galveston had been made a desert of sand
and debris, there were predictions that it would never rise again. What
was the outcome? A finer Galveston than before, and finer than many
years of slow improvement in the natural course would have made it.
Baltimore is busier commercially than it was before the great fire.

"San Francisco is exceedingly