the consciousness that "we be of one blood."

Wherever civilization has exercised its beneficent influence upon the
minds of men there is felt, for a little time at least, the sense that
all humanity is one; that the strife of man against man and nation
against nation is but a pitiful thing, and that we may better concern
ourselves with trying to make the common lot brighter and so soften the
rigors of the existence we all must face.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF WEALTH

Specifically does not such an appalling event serve to awaken
responsibility among the wealthy and powerful toward the poor and the
weak? When all goes well, when there are no thunderous warnings such as
this of the helplessness of man against the forces arrayed against him,
the fortunate do not realize that for millions mere existence is a
poignant struggle; that hunger and cold and disease prevail even when
there are no ghastly floods to make them vivid and picturesque. We do
not doubt that there are many who will be stirred by the shock of this
dreadful story to a deeper and more sympathetic understanding with the
conditions that surround them on every side.

INCENTIVE TO ENTERPRISE

If any further good can come from a catastrophe so cruel, it may be in
the stimulating pride of race which it engenders. Such experiences have
a unique effect upon the American nature. The greater the calamity which
falls upon a community the greater seems to be the rebound. Destruction
and hardship seem to open great reservoirs of latent energy,
inventiveness and enterprise.

Galveston, suddenly overwhelmed by a convulsion of nature, apparently
was doomed to molder away in forgotten ruins; but her people cleared the
wreck and built a greater city than before. Before the ashes of the old
San Francisco had cooled the vision of a better community rose before
her inhabitants, and they made it real.

Calamity sets free such a flow of creative power that destruction itself
makes for progress. These disasters concentrate upon constructive
enterprise stories of emotional energy that in other times are expended
in the fierce struggle of competitive existence.

THE GREATEST LESSON

But the great hidden teaching of disaster is that the laws of nature are
eternal and inexorable; that they move with unerring precision and
resistless force. And this truth applies not only to the tremendous
powers of the hurricane, the flood and the earthquake, but to economic
principles, wh