[16] "It has one of the finest, if not the finest, ports in North America. In 1900 a great tidal wave swept over the city, causing enormous damage and loss of life. While the city has had a certain growth since that time, it has been far outstripped by Houston, Dallas, and other Texas cities."--Kirby Page, formerly of Texas, in a letter to the author.
[17] Another principle is suggested for study by the following sentence in Ross' _Foundations of Sociology_ (p. 206): "Brusk revolution in the conditions of life or thought produces not sudden, but gradual changes in society." This might easily be elaborated.
It is indeed this very thing which makes possible the hope of eventual social control over disaster-stricken cities, and the transmutation of seeming evil into tremendous good. And this is in addition to the many practical social lessons which we have already been intelligent enough to preserve, such as those of better city-planning, and a more efficient charity organization.
How much of man's advancement has been directly or indirectly due to disaster?[18] The question asks itself and it is a question as yet without an answer. When the answer is at last written, will there not be many surprises? Pitt-Rivers tells us that "the idea of a large boat might have been suggested in the time of floods when houses floated down the rivers before the eyes of men."[19] A terrible storm at sea gave America its first rice.[20] City-planning may be said to have taken its rise in America as a result of the Chicago fire, and the rôle of catastrophe in the progress of social legislation is a study in itself. The impetus thus received is immeasurable. Historically, labor-legislation took its rise with the coming of an infectious fever in the cotton-mills of Manchester in 1784. After the Cherry mine disaster legislation ensued at once. Again it was the Triangle fire which led to the appropriation of funds for a factory investigation commission in the State of New York. The sinking of the Titanic has greatly reduced the hazards of the sea.
[18] The relationship of poetry and disaster is of interest. In a recent article on Disaster and Poetry a writer asks "whether often, if not always, suffering, disease and disaster do not bring to him [the poet] the will to create."--Marks, Jeanette, "Disaster and Poetry," _North American Review_, vol. 212, no. 1 (July, 1920), p. 93.