Nor can California claim the whole even of United States earthquakes. In
1755 all New England was shaken up, and Boston housetops and walls were
set dancing, the horror coming in "with a roaring noise, like that of
thunder," as the record has it, "and then a swell like the roaring sea";
and yet, and notwithstanding the great fire later, the city still shows
vitality, the people are not afraid, and property is valuable. And so in
regard to New York and London and all cities. In Missouri, in 1811, the
earth shook almost continuously for several months along a stretch of
three hundred miles, throwing up prairies into sand hills and submerging
forests. Chicago and New York, and all the country between, were visited
by earthquakes in 1870. Then there are Virginia and the Carolinas,
Alabama Texas and Colorado-there is not a state in the union that has
not had a touch of well-authenticated earthquakings at some time in its
history.

To one who knows the people and the country, the people with their
magnificent energy and ability, their indomitable will and their
splendid courage; the country with its boundless natural wealth and
illimitable potentialities; the city, key to the Golden Gate, which
opens the East to the West and West to East; the bay, mistress primeval,
through which flows the drainage of six hundred miles in length of
interior valley, the garden of the world; to one who has here lived and
loved, assisting in this grand upbuilding, thoughts of relinquishment,
of lesser possibilities, of meaner efforts, do not come.

What would you? If there is a spot on earth where life and property are
safer, where men are more enterprising and women more intelligent and
refined, where business is better or fortunes more safely or surely
made, the world should know of it. The earth may tremble now and then,