e in the strong box, that the prosperity of your
descendants was assured. Then imagine ruin coming like lightning in the
night. In the morning you are poor. Your business, your investments,
your very hopes, are gone. Everything is wiped out. The labor of a
lifetime must be begun again.

Such an experience was that of Baltimore in the fire of 1904.

On the sickening morning following the conflagration two Baltimore men,
friends of mine, walked down Charles Street to a point as near the
ruined region as it was possible to go.

"Well," said one, surveying the smoking crater, "what do you think of
it?"

"Baltimore is gone," was the response. "We are off the map."

How many citizens of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Galveston, of Dayton
have known the anguish of that first aftermath of hopelessness! How many
citizens of Baltimore knew it that day! And yet how bravely and with
what magic swiftness have these cities risen from their ruins! Was not
Rome burned? Was not London? And is it not, then, time for men to learn
from the history of other men and other cities that disaster does not
spell the end, but is oftentimes another name for opportunity?

Always, after disaster to a city, come improvements, but because
disaster not only cleans the slate but simultaneously stuns the mind, a
portion of the opportunity is invariably lost. The task of rebuilding,
of widening a few streets, looks large enough to him who stands amidst
destruction--and there, consequently, improvement usually stops. That is
why the downtown boulevard system of Chicago has yet to be completed, in
spite of the fact that it might with little difficulty have been
completed after the Chicago fire (although it is only just to add that
city planning was almost an unknown art in America at that time); and
that also is why the hills of San Francisco are not terraced, as it was
suggested they should be after the fire, but remain to-day inaccessible
to frontal attack by even the maddest mountain goat of a taxi driver.

These matters are not mentioned in the way of criticism: I have only
admiration for the devastated cities and for those who built them up
again. I call attention to lost opportunities with something like
reluctance, and only in the wish to emphasize the fact that our crippled
or destroyed cities do invariably rise again, and that if the next
American city to sustain disaster shall but have this simple lesson
learned in advance, it may thereby reg