But since the western hemisphere was discovered there has been in this
quarter of the globe no violence of natural forces at all comparable in
destructive fury with that which was manifested upon the Pacific coast.
The only other calamity at all equalling it, or surpassing it, was the
Civil War, and that was the work of the evil passions of man inciting
him to slay his brother, while Nature would have had him live in peace.

The earthquake in San Francisco, which crumbled strong buildings as if
they were made of paper, would have been terrible enough; but afterward
came the horror of fire and of imprisoned men and women burned alive,
and now to it was added the suffering of multitudes from hunger and
exposure.

Public attention is fixed on the great city; but smaller cities had
their days and nights of destruction, horror and misery. Some were
almost destroyed. Others were partly ruined, and beyond their borders,
over a wide area, the trembling of the earth toppled houses, annihilated
property and transformed riches into poverty. The cost in life can be
reckoned. The money loss will never be computed, for the appraised value
of the wrecked property conveys no notion of the consequences of the
almost complete paralysis, for a time, of the commercial operations by
means of which men and women earn their bread.

When the weakness and the folly and the sin of men bring woe upon other
men, there are plenty of texts for the preacher and no scarcity of
earnest preachers. But here is a vast and awful catastrophe that
befell from an act of Nature apparently no more extraordinary than the
shrinkage of hot metal in the process of cooling. The consequences are
terrifying in this case because they involve the habitations of half a
million people; but, no doubt, the process goes on somewhere within