established, the results from which will prove too vast and far-reaching
for our minds at present to fathom.

And in all the other many byways of progress the results of the last
half-century of effort on our sand-dune peninsula are not lost.
Earthquakes cannot destroy them; fire cannot burn them. San Francisco
grew from the Yerba Buena hamlet in sixty years. In a new and untried
field city-building then was something of an experiment; yet population
grew to half a million, and wealth in proportion; and never was
improvement so marked as just before the fire. With wealth and
population but little impaired, and with the ground cleared for new
constructive work, there would be nothing strange in a city here of
three or four millions of people in another sixty years. Actual progress
has scarcely been arrested. We are rudely hustled and awake to higher
and severer effort. No house or store or factory or business will be
rebuilt or established except in a larger and more efficient way, and
that is progress.

In and around the city are already more people than were here before the
fire, and soon there will be twice as many, for from every quarter are
coming mechanics and business men, attracted by high wages and the
material requirements of the city. Hundreds of millions of money from
the insurance companies and from local and outside capitalists are
finding safe and profitable investment. And this is only the beginning.

San Francisco is already a large manufacturing city; it will be many
times larger. Around its several hundred miles of bay shore and up the
Carquinez strait will be thousands of industries to-day not dreamed of,
and all ministering to the necessities of the thousand cities of the
Pacific. There is no place in the world better adapted for