"Well, what of it?" he asked quietly. "We die together--and in San Francisco."
A keen-witted business man once boasted that he could capitalize sentiment, express the spirit of the human soul in mere dollars and cents. What price could he give for a love and loyalty of that sort? That was, and still is, the affection that every San Franciscan from the ferry-house back to the farthest crest of the uppermost hill gives to his city--it is the thing that makes her one of the few American towns that possess distinctive personality.
A young matron told us of her own experience on the morning of the fire.
"Of course it was exciting," she said, "with the smoke rolling up upon us from downtown, and the rumors repeating themselves that the disaster was world-wide, that Chicago was in ruins and New York swallowed by a tidal wave, but there was nothing unreal about a single bit of it. I bundled my children together and hurried toward the Presidio--my knowledge of army men assured me that there could be no danger there. I took the little tent handed me and set up my crude house-keeping in it. It still seemed very real and not so very difficult.
"But when those odd little newspapers--that had been printed over in Oakland--came, and I saw the first of their head-lines 'San Francisco in Ruins' then it came upon me that our city, my city, was no more, and it was all over. It was all the most unreal thing in the world and I cried all that night, not for a single loss beyond that of the San Francisco that I had loved. But the next morning they told me how they had telegraphed East for all the architects in sight, and that morning I began planning a new house just as if it had been a pet idea for months and months and months...."
Out of such men and women a great city is ever builded. San Francisco may be wild and harum-scarum, and a great deal of its wildness is painfully exaggerated, but it is a mighty power in itself. Your San Franciscan is rightly proud of the progress made since the great disaster. More than $375,000,000--a sum approximating the cost of the Panama canal--has already been spent in rebuilding the city, and now, like a man who has spent his last dollar on a final substantial meal, the western metropolis calls for cake and scrapes up an additional $18,000,000 for a World's Fair "to beat everything that has gone before." That takes financing--of a high order. It takes something more. It has taken a real spirit--enthusiasm and love and courage--to build a new San Francisco that shall gradually obliterate the poignant memories of the city that was.