Page:Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam.djvu/55

Rh earthquakes drive away capital and confine reconstruction to insignificance?

Let us hasten to assure our friends that the day of doom has not yet come to this city; that the day of doom never comes to any city for so slight a cause, or for any cause short of a rain of brimstone and fire, as in the case of Sodom. Whether of imperial steel or of imperial shacks; whether calamities come in the form of such temblores as are here met occasionally in a mild form, or in the far more destructive form of hurricanes, floods, pestilence, sun—striking, and lightning, so common at the east and elsewhere, and from which San Francisco is wholly free, there will here forever be a city, a large, powerful, and wealthy city.

Every part of the earth is subject at any time to seismic disturbance, and no one can truthfully say that California is more liable to another such occurrence than any other part of the United States. Indeed, it should