but houses may be built which cannot be destroyed, fires are liable to
occur wherever material exists that will burn, but fires may be
controlled.

As for the city, its life and destiny, there is this to be said. The few
square miles of buildings burned were not San Francisco, they were only
buildings. Were every house destroyed and every street obliterated,
there would still remain the city, with its commerce, its manufactures,
its civilization, a spiritual city if you like, yet with material values
incapable of destruction-an atmosphere alive with cheerful industry;
also land values, commercial relations, financial connections, skilled
laborers and professional men, and a hundred other like souls of things.
In a thousand ideas and industries, though the ground is but ashes, the
spirit of progress still hovers over the hills awaiting incarnation.
Dependent on this pile of ashes, or the ghosts thereof, are fleets of
vessels sailing every sea; farms and factories along shore and back to
and beyond the Sierra; merchants and mechanics here and elsewhere; mines
and reclamation systems, and financial relations the world over.

The question now is not as to the existence or permanency of a central
city on the shores of San Francisco bay. That fact was established
beyond peradventure with the building of the bay, and nothing short of
universal cataclysm can affect it. It is rather to the quality of that
city that the consideration of the present generation should be
directed. The shell has been injured, but the soul of the city is
immortal; and in the restoration it would be strange if our
twentieth-century young men cannot do better in artistic city building
than the sturdy gold-seekers and their successors of half a century ago.

If history and human experiences teach anything; if from the past we may