THE Waikato Independent. TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 1907.

Waikato Independent, Volume V, Issue 321, 8 January 1907, Page 4

THE Waikato Independent. TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 1907.

Shortly after Mr Forrest’s arrival in Cambridge from his trip to the Homeland and through the United States, we had a very interesting conversation with him regarding his travels. In reply to a question, as to what struck him most on his trip, he informed us that there were two things which appealed to him more than anything else. One was the remarkable condition of San Francisco after the great earthquake: a condition, he described, as lamentable in the extreme, as the city was one of tragic desolation and ruin, with a hopeless outlook of its being reconstructed. The great difficulty was to get the piled up ruins out of the city, to enable new buildings to be erected, even if the business men could obtain the necessary funds to re-build, which he considered very doubtful, as most of them were utterly ruined. He declared that the tali stories circulated as to the immense rebuilding, said to be going on in San Francisco, were too steep to be true, or words to that effect.. As showing their unreliability, he stated that in five months,, at the time he was there, less than half-a-dozen business premises bad been re-erected. Of course, we do not pretend to give Mr Forrest’s exact words, but the foregoing is a generalisation of what he told us. Coming from such a reliable source, we were much impressed with Mr Forrest’s description of the deplorable state of affairs in San Francisco —a condition of things which the world had been kept in ignorance of. At the time we wondered how long it would be before the true condition of San Franoisco, as described to us by Mr Forrest, would be known to the world at large. But we had not long to wait; the other day, in going over our exchanges, we cam ( e across the following report of the British Consul-General of San Francisco, which recently appeared in the Board Trade Journal. “ Five months,” he writes, “have now elapsed since the earthquake, and there is very little sign of any permanent construction. The mass of debris, millions of tons of it, remains more or less where it was. The amount removed is barely noticeable.” The insurance in some cases has not been paid where the companies had “ earthquake clauses.” Where they have been paid, they have gone generally to the banks which have had mortgages on the buildings destroyed. Loans cannot be obtained, as the labor situation renders capitalists cautious, and no one has any security to offer. The banks are loaded up with real estate on which they have foreclosed, and

which is now not worth half the money advanced upon it. San Francisco, in a word, “ is thrown back practically to the days of 1849.” From the above it will be seen that Mr Forrest’s description was most accurate; is corroborated by the Con-sul-General almost word for word, and speaks eloquently for Mr Forrest’s discernment, in arriving at the truth, in the course of his short visit to ’Frisco.