Perhaps after having given California her artistic due in this handsome manner, and being, myself, well out of the State, this may be the best time to touch upon a sensitive point. As the reader may have observed, I always try to evade responsibility when playing with fire, and if one does that with fire, it becomes all the more necessary to observe the same rule in the case of earthquakes.
In this instance the best way out of it for me seems to be to put the blame on Baedeker, who, in his little red book, declares that "earthquakes occur occasionally in San Francisco, but have seldom been destructive," after which he recites that in 1906 "a severe earthquake lasting about a minute" visited the city, that "the City Hall became a mass of ruins but, on the whole, few of the more solid structures were seriously injured."
San Francisco is notoriously sensitive upon this subject, and her sensitiveness is not difficult to understand. For one thing, earthquakes, interesting though they may be as demonstrations of the power of Nature, are not generally considered a profitable form of advertising for a city, although, curiously enough, they seem, like volcanic eruptions, to visit spots of the greatest natural beauty. For another thing San Francisco feels that "earthquake" is really a misnomer for her disaster, and that this fact is not generally understood in such remote and ill-informed localities as, for instance, the Island of Manhattan.
There is not a little justice in this contention. However the city may have been "shaken down" in the past, by corrupt politicians, the quake did no such thing. All the damage done by the actual trembling of the ground might have been repaired at a cost of a few millions, had not the quake started the fire and at the same time destroyed the means of fighting it. Baedeker, always conservative, estimates the fire loss at three hundred and fifty millions.
Furthermore, it is contended in San Francisco that the city is not actually in the earthquake belt. Scientists have examined the earthquake's fault-line, and have declared that it comes down the coast to a point some miles north of the city, where it obligingly heads out to sea, passing around San Francisco, and coming ashore again far to the south.
While, to my mind, this seems to indicate an extraordinary degree of good-nature on the part of an earthquake, I have come, through a negative course of reasoning, to accept it as true. For it so happens that I have discussed literature with a considerable number of scientific men, and I cannot but conclude from the experience that they must know an enormous amount about other matters. Therefore, on earthquakes, I am bound entirely by their decisions, and I believe that all well-ordered earthquakes will be so bound, and that the only chance of future trouble from this source, in San Francisco, might arise through a visit from some irresponsible, renegade quake which was not a member of the regular organization.
As to San Francisco's "touchiness" upon the subject there is this much more to be said. A cow is rumored to have kicked over a lamp and started the Chicago Fire. An earthquake kicked over a building and started the San Francisco Fire. People do not refer to the Chicago Fire as the "Cow." Why then should they refer to the San Francisco Fire as the "Earthquake"? That is the way they reason at the Golden Gate. But however that may be, the important fact is this: the Chicago Fire taught that city a lesson. When Chicago was rebuilt in brick and stone, instead of wood, another cow could kick over another lamp without endangering the whole town. The same story is repeated in San Francisco. The city has been magnificently reconstructed. Another quake might kick over another building, but the city would not go as it did before, because, aside from the fact that the main part of it is now unburnable, as nearly as that may be said of any group of buildings, the most elaborate system of fire-protection has been installed, so that if, in future, water connections are broken at one point, or two points, or several points, there will still be plenty of water from other sources.
As an outsider, in love with San Francisco, who has yet had the temerity to mention the forbidden word, I may perhaps venture a little farther and suggest that it is time for sensitiveness over the word "earthquake" to cease.
Let us use what word we like: the fact remains that the disaster brought out magnificent qualities in San Francisco's people; they were victorious over it; they have fortified themselves against a repetition of it; they transformed catastrophe into opportunity. Already, I think, many San Franciscans understand that the cataclysm was not an unmixed evil, and I believe that, strange though it may seem, there will presently come a time when, for all their half-melancholy "before the fire" talk, they will admit that on the whole it was a good thing. For it is granted to but few cities and few men to really begin life anew.