"With all her experience in conflagrations and attendant horrors, Chicago has nothing to compare with this catastrophe. Even the fire of 1871, which swept over a vast extent of country and reduced proud and formidable looking buildings and scattered their strength to the winds, lacked the comparative loss of life which this one disaster has entailed. Property may be dissipated, but it can be recovered once more.
"Death robs us forever of our dear ones, and leaves a void which time can never fully fill.
MOURNING AND INDIGNATION.
"As we tread today upon the very heels of this latest sad event and take a comprehensive view of its details and results, no one, not even though he have no personal interest in the loss entailed, can help joining in the expression of mourning which will go up, and at the same time give vent to the already too long-suppressed feelings of indignation, which have from time to time arisen when thinking of the flimsy manner in which theaters are built, their lack of protection against fire and the inadequate means afforded inmates to escape therefrom in the event of an undue excitement that should spread a panic, ere the breaking out of a fire.
"The sympathy for the dead will be equally balanced by vigorous denunciation of the criminality of everybody who, in an official or proprietary capacity, is interested therein.
NOTHING ELSE SO HORRIBLE.
"In the history of the country there are few events that can match this one. The burning of the Richmond theater, the falling of the Pemberton mill, the burning of the cotton mill at Fall River, the breaking loose of the Haydenville mill pond, with now and then of late years the engulfing of some steamer on inland lakes or the ocean, have for the time cast a great pall of mourning over the land, but they only stand in the same category with this last disaster, and can hardly rival it in swiftness of culmination or suddenness of origin.
"For the time being this will furnish the chief topic for conversation, and if the Times mistakes not, it will as well arouse the public to a complete realization of the unsafeness of theaters in general, and have the beneficial effect even in its tragic nature of moving the people to insist upon the adoption of a certain amount of safeguards against a like event in the future. The time to move in this matter is at this critical juncture, even while the charred remains of the
UNFORTUNATE VICTIMS
are lying stark upon their biers and friends are stabbed with the grief of the untimely taking off of their friends.