It must be discouraging to try to bring order out of the chaos that was wreaked there. The great library, which was wrecked within a month of its completion, and the gymnasium have never been rebuilt, although the dome of the latter is still held aloft on stout steel supports. The chapel, which was Mrs. Stanford's great pride and for which she made so many sacrifices still rears its crossing. Nave and transepts, to say nothing of the marvelous mosaics, were leveled in the twinkling of that April dawn. The long vistas of arched pergolas, the triumph of the master, Richardson, still remain. And the ruin done in that catastrophe to the high-sprung arch he placed over the main entrance to the quadrangle has been in part eradicated.
For Leland Stanford University today represents one of the bravest attempts ever made in this land to repair an all but irreparable loss. It has never lost either faith and hope, and so the visitor to its campus today will see the beginnings toward a complete replacement of the buildings of what was one of the "show universities" of the land. With a patience that must have been infinite, the stones of the old chapel have been sorted out of the ruin--even fragments of the intricate mosaics have been carefully saved--numbered and placed in sequence for re-erection. Already the steel frame of nave and transepts is up again and the tedious work of erecting the masonry walls upon it begun. Leland Stanford has, quite naturally, caught the spirit of San Francisco--the city that would not be defeated.
To analyze that spirit in a sweeping paragraph is all but impossible. Incident upon incident will show it in all its phases. For instance, there was in San Francisco on the morning of the earthquake a sober-minded German citizen who had put his all into a new business--a business that had just begun to prove the wisdom of his investment. When Nature awoke from her long sleep and stretching began to rock the city by the Golden Gate the German rushed upstairs to where his wife and daughter slept. He found them in one another's arms and frantic with terror.
"Papa! Papa!" they shrieked. "We are going to die. It is the end of the world--the business is gone. We are going to die!"