sagacious men, such men as build a state; hopeless, broken, disappointed
men, who have made this city of hope their last resort; gamblers,
parasites, bartenders, agitators, self-seekers, haters of men and haters
of organization, impossibles, men uncontrolled and uncontrollable, of
every nation and with every dialect of the civilized world--and of
uncivilized worlds also;--the most cosmopolitan of all American towns,
the one fullest of the joy of living, the one least fearful of future
disaster, "serene, indifferent to fate," thus her own poets have styled
her, and on no other city since the world began has fate, unmalicious,
mechanical and elemental, wrought such a terrible havoc. In a day this
city has vanished; the shock of a mighty earthquake forgotten in an hour
in the hopeless horror of fire; homes, hotels, hospitals, hovels,
libraries, museums, skyscrapers, factories, shops, banks and gambling
dens, all blotted out of existence almost in the twinkling of an eye;
millionaires, beggars, dancers and workers, men great and small, foolish
and courageous, with their women and children of like natures with them,
fleeing together by the thousands and hundreds of thousands to the hills
and the sand-dunes, where on the grass and the shifting sands they all
slept together or were awake together in the old primal equality of
life. Never since man began to plan and to create has there been such a
destruction of the results of human effort. Never has a great calamity
been met with so little repining. Never before has the common man shown
himself so hopeful, so courageous, so sure of himself and his future.
For it is the man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man
that shapes the fates.

It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken and
cannot be burned. The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he
stands outside of them and can build again. It is a wonderful thing to
build a great city. Men can do this in a quarter century, working