But this is not an all-sufficient explanation, and indeed applies particularly to countries which have not been bereft of the raw materials of industrial machinery. San Francisco recovered exceedingly rapidly from her terrible experience of 1906. Indeed her quick recovery has been called one of the wonders of the age. San Francisco was not depopulated. Her actual losses of life were but four hundred and ninety-eight, and those injured four hundred and fifteen. The loss of life on the other hand was about two thousand in Halifax, a city of fifty thousand population—but one-eighth that of San Francisco—and her list of injured ran into many thousands. And yet the same phenomenon appeared.
There are other factors both social and economic which must not be omitted from an account of the influences of recuperation, namely the equipmental and other factors which produce social surplus. Disaster-stricken communities cannot survive unless their “surplus energy exceeds their needs.” They cannot become normal until the social surplus is restored. The social surplus, according to Professor Tenney, is “merely the sum-total of surplus energy existing in the individuals composing a social group, or immediately available to such individuals.”[144] It includes not only “bodily vigor” but “such material goods also as are immediately available for the restoration of depleted bodily vigor.” It is not only physiological, as life energy, and social, as conditions of knowledge and institutional facilities, but also socio-economic, as equipment for the maintenance or restoration of physiological and social needs. In catastrophe bodily vigor may have been depleted, and material goods been consumed. No period of recuperation or rapid gain can ensue unless such equipment is in some degree replaced and a balance of social surplus restored. This is the conditio sine qua non of recuperation, and of the transition from a pain-economy to a pleasure-economy,[145] after disaster. Certainly the maintenance of the standard of living demands it. The standard of living has been defined as the “mode of activity and scale of comfort which a person has come to regard as indispensable to his happiness and to secure and retain which he is willing to make any reasonable sacrifice.” Following Professor Seager's association of the standard of living with population, the reduction of population in catastrophe of a certain character might conceivably operate to automatically heighten the standard of living, just as the growth of population often brings about its fall. But catastrophe often consumes great quantities of material goods and brings about a change in incomes and in occupations.[146] Seager notes that:
Actual starvation confronts more rarely those belonging to the class of manual workers, but for them also under-nutrition is a possibility which prolonged illness or inability to obtain employment may at any time change into a reality. The narrow margin which their usual earnings provide above the bare necessaries of life, coupled with their lack of accumulated savings, makes them especially liable, when some temporary calamity reduces their incomes, to sink permanently below the line of self-support and self-respect.[147]
It must be remembered that at Halifax while the equipmental damage was stupendous, still the heart of the downtown business section remained sound. The banking district held together, and the dislocation of business machinery was less protracted on that account. To this it is necessary to add how to a very considerable extent the material losses were replaced by communities and countries which not only supplied the city with the material of recuperation but with men and means as well. Were her own workmen killed and injured? Glaziers, drivers, repair men and carpenters came by train-loads bringing their tools, their food and their wages with them. The city's population was increased by thirty-five hundred workmen, twenty-three hundred of whom were registered with the committee at one time. Was her glass destroyed? Eighty acres of transparences came for the temporary repairs and had been placed by January the twenty-first. Were her buildings gone? Seven million, five hundred thousand feet of lumber were soon available to house the homeless. Were her people destitute? Food and clothing were soon stacked high. Were her citizens bankrupt because of losses? Fifty thousand dollars came from Newfoundland, another fifty thousand from New Zealand, one hundred thousand from Quebec, one hundred thousand from Montreal, two hundred and fifty thousand from Australia, five million from Great Britain. In merchandise, clothing and cash a million came from Massachusetts. In about fifteen weeks, aside from the Federal grant, eight millions were contributed. The total contributions from all sources amounted finally to twenty-seven million dollars.
Factors such as these must not be omitted in examining the sociological recuperation of a smitten city. And when the experience of Halifax is set side by side with the related experiences of other cities a conclusion may be drawn that disaster-stricken communities can always count upon public aid, for the reasons which have already been discussed. But there is found to be strongly suggested a correlation between the striking character or magnitude of a disaster and the generosity of the relief response,[148] as there is also with the immediacy of the appeal. “It is not the facts themselves which strike the popular imagination” says Le Bon, “but the way in which they take place.”[149] There have been disasters relatively serious, such as the St. Quentin forest fire, where repeated appeals met with astonishingly little response from the people. “A single great accident” continues Le Bon, “will profoundly impress them even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of a hundred small accidents put together.” It was in recognition of this principle that “it was decided to transfer the residue of the amount contributed [after the Triangle fire] to the contingent fund of the American Red Cross, to be used in disasters, which in their nature do not evoke so quick or generous public response, but where the suffering is as grievous.”[150]
Besides the relation of the tragic in catastrophe to generosity and other expressions of sympathy, the experience at Halifax suggests also a relationship between the aid furnished by a contributing community and that community's own previous history in regard to calamity. As an instance may be cited the quick and splendid response which came from St. John and Campbellton, two New Brunswick cities with unforgettable memories of great disasters which they themselves had suffered. It is also not improbable that the study of comparative catastrophe would reveal a correlation between the relative amount of aid given and the distance of those who give. Indeed there are reasons which suggest that the relationship might be written thus: that relief in disaster varies inversely as the square of the cost distance. The association here suggested is given additional plausibility from the fact that attention to certain types of news seems to vary according to this principle, and news notice is no inconsiderable factor in disaster aid.
Enough has been said to make it clear that at the present time, in the absence of any scientific method of socially ameliorating the consequences of catastrophe, relief is a fluctuating quantity, and is poorly apportioned from the point of view of need. While such conditions obtain, disasters must inevitably contribute to the inequalities which break the hearts of men. It is alas true, that after all our generosities and philanthropies
many people lose their normal position in the social and economic scale through earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, railway wrecks, fires, and the common accidents of industrial life. These accidents naturally have a vast influence over the lives of their victims; for they often render people unfit to struggle along in the rank and file of humanity.[151]
The only socially defensible way of doing is to spread the economic results of these disasters over the entire community in some form of intra-city catastrophe insurance administered by the Federal government. This alone will overcome the irrationality of an inequitable levy upon the more sympathetic, and the fluctuations of disproportionate relief. And even beyond this step is there not the possibility of an international system in which each nation will insure the other? Certainly at Halifax the aid contributed came from many nations and tongues. But while we are discussing what ought to be and eventually will be done, one very practical step remains which may be taken at once. At the Halifax disaster, we have seen that much of the direction and technical leadership, welcome as it was, and saving the situation as it did, yet came from without rather than from within the country. There is no Canadian who will close these pages without asking whether this must always be. May it not be respectfully suggested, as a concluding result of this study, that the Canadian government, take immediate steps to develop a staff of experts, a reserve fund, and stations of relief strategically located in Canada—these stations to have in their keeping left-over war-material, such as tents, stores, and other equipment together with records of available experts who have had experience in disasters and who may be subject to call when emergencies arise.
And now to return to our thesis, and its special enquiry, namely, wherein is the specific functioning of catastrophe in social change? We have thus far concerned ourselves with the major factors of recuperation, intra-social forces, social service, and legislation.