The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, APRIL 26, 1906 THE SAN FRANCISCO CALAMITY

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 17, 26 April 1906, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

THURSDAY, APRIL 26, 1906 THE SAN FRANCISCO CALAMITY

To promote the cause of Religion and Justice ly the ways of Truth and Peace. Leo. XIII, to the N.z. Tablet

Wfififit IIX W ° rld has got) in the San Francisco [ M\!i calamity, a rude reminder that the crust JOJT^ of solld earth on which we live and move Jgskri ]s by no means as rigid ana unresponsive as a shrll of cast iion. ihe density and elasf'^l£3% ticity of its materials vary \ery wid«ly. 'pg?' ' The t;Vaky ' area is, happily, very small. But San Francisco lies within it— on the ' unlucLy ' fortieth para'.lil of latitude, and on a coast that slopes 'down rapidly from the vast mountainrange of the Rockies to the sudden shores and deep waters of tiie Pacific Ocean. Such a territory (say the geologists), is peculiarly suoject to the side-slips and settlements and adjustments of strata that are caused by the cooling and creeping and shrinking of the comparative egg shell of a solid eartih-surface which encloses the molten interior of our planet. The ruinous disasitex that came so suddenly on San Francisco last week will be classified in history among what Mallet calls ' great earthquakes '—that is, - \iotent eiicrts of seismic (or earth-shaking) lorces, that do damage on a large scale, demolish cities, pile up the dead, or— as in the eruption of Tarawera in 1880— produce marked alterations upon the affected portions of a country's surface. The longdrawn siege of Paris left ' the gayest ' with two hundred acres of ruins. But far worse havoc than \that of shot and shell was wrought by an earthquake in a few seconds upon thci fairest and greatest city of the Pacific slope. It set, up an earth-wave that shook and tore and crumpled (towns and cities a hundred miles away, and left a photographic lecord of itself upen every seismograph from China to Peru.

A great shock of horror and pity was the first feeling, with which we on the outer rim of the earth heard of the red disaster winch left the greater part cf Kan. Francisco an area of tangled and burning ruins. As further news oozed— at hrst with exasperating slowness — througii the wires, one learned to admire the spirit in which the .afflicted people faced the terrible ordeal of wreck and fire and threatened famine. Considering the suddenness land magnitude of the catastrophe, there appears to have been relatively admirable order. A fel-low-feejijig makes the whole* world kin ; and a common calamity seems to have mellowed unaccustomed hearts towards each mother, and blotted out, for/ the moment, all' artificial social classifications among the huddled refugees in the public parks. And who cannot but admire the splendid pluck, the soaring hopefulness,' the

virile energy and self-rejiiance iwhich declined the freely proffered foreign aid, and set to work to rebuild the city in faithful and well-tried steel before the shattered •walls had ceased from crashing down, and while the smoke was still rising from its blackened ruins ? Rest to the dead who have gone to their account ! And may the Comforter of the afflicted dry the tears of those that mourn ! And crowns of bay for the men who gave the example of sucly hig/h hope and courage and resolution'in the midst of such sudden and overwhelming devastation ! * Happily, in the case of the San Francisco earthquake, the early estimates of the sacrifice of life have been found excessive. Great earthquakes have, however, left theij marl* 'deep upon human histcry. They enter into competition with war as a destroyer of property and life. In Cilicia, for instance, some CO, OOO lives were lost through an earthquake in 12G8 ; 4U.000 at Naples on December 5, 1156 ; 30,000 at Lisbon in 1531 ; 70,000 in the Neapolitan territory on July 30, 1G26 ; over 100,000 in Sicily in September, 16«J3, while 54 villages and towns were wrecked, and Catania and its 18,000 inhabitants were witped off the face of the earth. Mulhall's table ot the most ' destructive earthquakes cf the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in his ' Dictionary of Statistics ') >cpens with a record of 190,000 deaths at Yeddo (Japan) in 1793,, and closes with the 2,000 victims of the great ' shake 7 at Ischia (in the Bay of Naples) in 1883. But the great statistician's list is curiously incomplete. No mention, for instance, is made of the 12,000 souls that were divided from 12,000 bodies when Caracas was destroyed on March 26, 1812 ; nor of the 10,OUO victims ot the Manila ' quakes ' of July, 1863 ; nor of the 25,000 lives that were lost,, and the £60,000,000 worth of pro; erty that was destroyed, on August 13-15, 13(58, when n\e cities and a number of towns and villages in Ecuatlor and Peru were pulled to pieces 'by earth-waves and tidal-waves that wrought and raged like regiments of demon Sampsons. Neither is there 'any record of the great convulsion of Krakatoa (■1883), with its 3b, 500 dead, nor of that of Nippon Island (1891), with its lU,UOO victims in round numbers. In reading of the woful destruction wrought by earthquakes, it is some comtort to learn, on the authority of the astronomer Herschel, that they present some compensating advantages. ' Earthquakes,' said he, ' dreadlul as they are, as local and temporary visitations, are, in fact, unavoidable — I had almost said necessary— incidents in a wast system of action to which we owe the very ground we stand upon— tiie very land we inhabit, without which neither man, beast, nor bird -would have a place for their existence, and the world would be the haJbutation of nothing but fishes.' Which may be a comfort— it only a cold comfort— to thos>e who look upon the ryins of their homes in San Francisco.