Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/267

Rh Denmark the general average is a trifle less than 33 cents per capita. In Italy it is as low as 12 cents and in Germany it has never been above 49 cents. In thirty of the principal foreign cities the average was 51 cents, while in 25'2 of our cities the average was $3.10! In New York City in 1908 there were 14,000 fires and-the property loss amounted to $7,250,000, and the cost of maintaining the city fire department was $7,000,000; in St. Louis, there were 3,200 fires with a loss of $1,298,000, and the cost of the fire department was $1,018,000, and so our cities run with a general average of the cost of fire departments almost equallingequaling [sic] the actual combustion of property. In Europe, Rome may be taken as a fair example, an average. There fire losses amounted to $56,000 in a year in 270 fires and the maintenance of its 200 firemen costs $50,000 and Rome is a city of 500,000 people, or nearly the size of St. Louis.

Let me add just one more comparison and then we will leave tabulations alone, for statistics are always more or less wearying. In this country in January of 1908 the total amount of building and repairs done scarcely reached $16,000,000; during that same month fire destroyed $24,000,000 worth of property.

Surely we have had figures enough to clearly establish and to firmly impress even the layman that fire can be said literally "to be eating at the very vitals" of our economic structure. Many causes have contributed to this deplorable condition. One is that our people are naturally reckless and careless and build as they do much else, merely for the moment, temporarily. Then, too, until very recently our lumber supply has seemed inexhaustible and it was the material with which buildings could be erected with greatest rapidity and least initial cost. The pioneer couldn't be expected to haul brick and steel into the wilderness when he had trees all about him from which he could fashion his rude habitation. Pioneer settlements grew into villages and the villages into cities and the habit of building of wood stuck to them. Why, even last year, with the price of lumber a hundred per cent, higher than it was ten years ago and with incombustible materials available everywhere and at low cost we still built 61 per cent, of the year's, construction of wood. In the older communities, in Europe, they have got well over their pioneerdom and lumber has never been so plentiful as with us and the authorities have had more forethought and realized the necessity of better construction so that the general average of the buildings in cities, towns and villages is infinitely less inflammable than is the average here. But from that it must not be deduced that the science of building is carried to greater perfection there than here. That seems an anomalous condition but it's a fact nevertheless that our architects and engineers know a great deal more about fire-proof construction and practise it to a far higher degree of perfection than do