that fluttering birds and frolicking children have learned to sing; workmen of all grades, quiet, courageous and self-respecting, and weak, disgruntled and incapable; bright-eyed, clear-headed, sagacious men, such men as build a state; hopeless, broken, disappointed men, who have made this city of hope their last resort; gamblers, parasites, bartenders, agitators, self-seekers, haters of men and haters of organization, impossibles, men uncontrolled and uncontrollable, of every nation and with every dialect of the civilized world—­and of uncivilized worlds also;—­the most cosmopolitan of all American towns, the one fullest of the joy of living, the one least fearful of future disaster, “serene, indifferent to fate,” thus her own poets have styled her, and on no other city since the world began has fate, unmalicious, mechanical and elemental, wrought such a terrible havoc.  In a day this city has vanished; the shock of a mighty earthquake forgotten in an hour in the hopeless horror of fire; homes, hotels, hospitals, hovels, libraries, museums, skyscrapers, factories, shops, banks and gambling dens, all blotted out of existence almost in the twinkling of an eye; millionaires, beggars, dancers and workers, men great and small, foolish and courageous, with their women and children of like natures with them, fleeing together by the thousands and hundreds of thousands to the hills and the sand-dunes, where on the grass and the shifting sands they all slept together or were awake together in the old primal equality of life.  Never since man began to plan and to create has there been such a destruction of the results of human effort.  Never has a great calamity been met with so little repining.  Never before has the common man shown himself so hopeful, so courageous, so sure of himself and his future.  For it is the man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates.

It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken and cannot be burned.  The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he stands outside of them and can build again.  It is a wonderful thing to build a great city.  Men can do this in a quarter century, working together each at his own part.  More wonderful still is it to be a city, for a city is composed of men, and now, ever and forever the man must rise above his own creations.  That which is in the man is greater than all that he can do.

“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
My head is bloody but not bowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul!”