A panoramic view of San Francisco

N complying with the request to write a few words for the PACIFIC MONTHLY apropos of the recent earthquake and conflagration in San Francisco, I feel that I can do nothing better than to dwell briefly on the wonderful calmness and courage of the people of this city, in the face of one of the most appalling calamities that ever befell any community. San Francisco, no doubt, has, or, at least, had its full share of criminals and equally worthless and dangerous persons, who would have been more than glad to take advantage of the opportunity to loot such a treasure house as the banks, stores and dwellings of the opulent metropolis of the Pacific Coast. These people

were overawed by the rifles with fixed bayonets, and the full cartridge belts of one thousand seven hundred regular soldiers and a large force of National Guards in addition to the police force of the city.

The great majority of the people, however, of course, need not be considered in such a connection. Although they saw their homes being destroyed, they were remarkably calm and cool and amenable to control; troops and police rarely found it necessary to use force in controlling the vast throng of three hundred thousand people, who, in three days and nights, were rendered homeless.

Present indications are that the courage. of the people in rehabilitating the city will be as wonderful as the calmness with which they have faced the disaster from the beginning.

HE crack has been followed one hundred and ninety-two miles. It is widest where it enters the sea at Alder Creek, near Point Arena, and its violence was greatest at that point. It was also noted about fifty miles further out in the ocean, where it unshipped the rudder of a steamer passing Cape Mendocino. From Point Arena it goes in a straight line, passing in the sea near Fort Bragg, and reaching to the bridge over the Pajaro River at Chittenden. From that point it passes about twelve miles, ending two miles southeast of San Juan Bautista Mission. At its northern end, and for about a hundred miles, there was a violent movement of the earth to the southward on the east side of the

crack, the move being sixteen feet and seven inches in various places measured. On the peninsula of San Francisco the movement is about eight feet. It falls to two feet at the bridge over the Pajaro River, and then passes to nothing. It is not quite certain whether the east side moved southward or the west side northward, but the evidence known to me all favors the latter view. The east side is about three feet higher than the west side in this region, while north of the Bay of San Francisco the west side seems to override about the same distance. There

are some very picturesque phenomena along the line of the fault, as in passing in front of a man's house a row of shade trees are all shifted in front of the dairy behind. The rose garden in front of the house is shifted back of it, and a patch of raspberries takes it place.

N the midst of the distress of the fire, a leading citizen of San Francisco met one of the city's matrons fleeing for shelter. "I have lost everything," she said. "But not your beauty, madam." "Nor you your good breeding," she rejoined.

The most interesting thing today in San Francisco is the spirit of its citizens, men and women. It might fairly be said there is nothing else left, for it was a marvelously clean sweep. But it alone is wealth.

Nobody talks much about his individual losses. Sometimes the grotesqueness of the misery, the very joke of the thing, is too good to be lost, and they tell it. "Not a thing left but the suit I am standing in,"

says one business man the day after the fire; but the next day he meets the cheering word of a friend: "It's all right; we've found you another-your portrait was rescued from the Art Institute," and they rejoice together.

Factions, enmities, and politics have all dissolved in the universal solvent of common loss and common sympathy. In a united endeavor of public service, San Francisco has found itself. So the public spirit of Chicago had its birth from the stress of disaster.

The work of relief is passing now from the emergency type to the orderly and professional form. The army has become the mechanism for the assembling, classification and disbursement of supplies. At first three hundred and fifty thousand were fed; for the first two or three days, probably four hundred thousand. A hundred

and twenty-five thousand of these were on the east side of the bay. Today the number is reduced to only a few thousand.

Work is reviving. Everyone is seeking to find his place again in normal social existence, and on the basis of earning and buying. The wise charity has now to exert itself in the direction of helping the complicated social machine get into working again. The tools of life from saucepan to chisel must be restored. The shopkeeper has no goods or sign, the dentist no forceps, the dressmaker no sewing machine, the musician no violin, the lawyer no library. One sewing machine given not long ago to a dressmaker started her work going, and, to my knowledge, provided the nucleus of employment for five girls, each of whom help support others. When the dressmaking starts, the shop will feel it, and so the movement spreads.

The real estate which a month ago was a field of ruin is beginning to bear its first

crop. Shanties and shacks are springing up like a crop of weeds on every hand. There are two or three hundred of then already, and some have stocks of goods. Meantime, the buildings that were burned out, but not ruined, are being cleared. Some of them will be in use within sixty days. Some of them with improvised windows and partitions already serve for business purposes.

The retail trade is now on its feet. though it limps. In three years the new San Francisco will have taken its shape, and in five years it will be worth any man's while to come and see. Its people have been tried in fire and have proved their grit. They have learned that solid buildings of steel and concrete are good buildings to have, but that surer than any building and firmer than the crust of mother earth are the loyalties of human brotherhood and the tender mercies of human love.