THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 1906, THE AMERICAN AT BAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13160, 25 April 1906, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 1906, THE AMERICAN AT BAY.

The directness of the American character has never been more clearly displayed than when the people of San Francisco suddenly found themselves confronted with the most appalling and prolonged disaster that has yet, visited a civilised community. The untrammelled energy with which they met the danger, and the democratic confidence with which they spontaneously established an' iron dictatorship, are already to be seen, and will doubtlessly prove the most interesting social feature of the epoch when its history comes to be written. In countries which have had to fight hard for individual liberty, and have found autocracy a veritable Old Man of the Seas, there is a persistent tendency to take advantage of moments of national disorganisation to establish anarchic conditions. Even in British countries we view with reluctance any resort to military rule in times of civic disorder, and have an ingrained objection to any departure from the legal processes which have been found to conserve our civic freedoms. The American has no such prejudices, or if he has them has the singular faculty of being able to eliminate them from his mind without any great difficulty and without affecting his democratic instincts. Of this national characteristic San Francisco has heretofore supplied the most famous of demonstrations, when its historic Vigilance Committee, supported by the whole of the law-abiding section of the population, seized the reins of civic authority in the lawless days of the gold rush and sternly crushed out murder, robbery, and rapine in illegal but effective ways. The recent experience of the burning city recalls graphically the rule of the Yigilants, with their undisguised , leaders,, their forced contributions

towards expenses, their uniformed " deputies," and their ruthless extermination of all things criminal. With the passing of the necessity for extraordinary action the Vigilance Committee handed the city oyer to the constitutional authorities it had swept aside and dispensed with, its members carrying into retirement the respect of all good citizens, a respect of which the test of time has in no way deprived them. In the emergency which arose after the earthquake shocks that laid San Francisco partially in ruins and left j it exposed to the ravages of rising j conflagrations and to the still more j awful perils of unrestrained lawlessness. there was fortunately no conflict of opinion between good citizens and the constitutional authorities, as in the time of the Vigilants. .We j are informed that the confusion arising from diverse authority, from the 1 city, the State, and the Federal officials, each endeavouring to do their best in their own way, was quickly perceived, and that the local authorities immediately subordinated them- | selves for the common good, placing I the military commander in supreme control of the lives and fortunes of i the imperilled community. Here we have a monumental instance, that will long be a precedent to free peoples in times of public peril, of a military dictatorship being spontaneously and instantaneously established without any constitutional authorisation; of individual rights and privileges being unhesitatingly suspended in order that ;he public safety might be Avon through intelligent obedience. Neither city council, nor State Legislature, nor national Congress, neither city charters nor State constitutions, neither party caucus nor legal decisions nor Supreme Court injunctions, could help San Francisco when its streets flamed to the skies and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were being driven before the fiery blast. Other peoples might have doubted what to do, but Americans at bay with their directness of perception could not possibly doubt. The great need was a single authority, a single leader, a single source of common and united action, and they created it. Major-General Funston became their man of the moment. The Anglo-Saxon genius for law and order has never been more magnificently demonstrated than in the new law and the new order, instantly established, devotedly upheld, unflinchingly executed, that arose as by enchantment amid the momentary chaos of stricken and flaming San Francisco. Of Major-General Funston, dictator of San Francisco, the world at large has hitherto known nothing, beyond that he was the man that captured Aguinaldo, the rebel leader in the Philippines, at great personal risk. It. will know him henceforward as the man who did not shrink from responsibility, and who did his duty in one of the most extraordinary offices that ever fell to the lot of a human being. It is not to be supposed that, he had not abundance of capable lieutenants, civic, military and naval, or that any capable man shrank in that stupendous emergency from doing his duty to the fullest. But what must be held in mind is the basis of the new order which was established. In it "legal" ceased to have meaning, though " law" suddenly became draconic. Individual rights to property were, in a manner, abolished, while the individual right to personal property was sacredly enforced. The public good became the supreme law and the public good was interpreted for the time being through the mouth of Major-General Funston. By his orders every man in uniform became a judge of life and death, authorised to shoot thieves on sight", without trial and without appeal. By his orders liquor was seized and destroyed, provisions seized and distributed, hundreds of houses blown into the air in the making of gaps across which the fires could not pass. By his orders every steamer in port was detained, houses turned- into hospitals for the sick and injured, water distributed to the thirsty, bread to the hungry. Under his rule the -death penalty avenged insults upon women, Asiatic riot was stilled by the ready bayonet, and great guns helped to wreck the city in order to save the remnant. All this would have been impossible had not an immediate and loyal obedience been given to the dictatorate by the whole law-abiding population. And in this lay the strength of the method, so adapted to the American temper and to the American habit of moving in a bee-line towards any great goal: that it consolidated the manhood of the community and enabled pressing work to be undertaken where no other method could have been effective. We read of civilians leaving their wives and families to join the firemen in their rescue work, of the restoration of the water supply and of the drainage system being hurried on in the midst of the disorder, of compulsory burial parties, of the formation of relief camps, and of the speedy relaxation of the strain by the drafting to other towns of half the homeless and by the pouring into the city of train loads of surgeons and supplies. When all is known of the week-of horror through which the great Californian metropolis passed the world will be impressed not more by the magnitude of the calamity than by the magnanimity with which the | citizens of San Francisco flung authority to a military commander and justified democracy by abrogating all those civic rights and legal processes which only a free people can perceive to be the ordinary means and not the invariable end of freedom.