—­MONTAIGNE.

Following the incorporation of the city, Baltimore grew much as Chicago was destined to grow more than a century later; within less than thirty years, when Chicago was a tiny village, Baltimore had become the third city in the United States:  a city of wealthy merchants engaged in an extensive foreign trade; for in those days there was an American merchant marine, and the swift, rakish Baltimore clippers were known the seven seas over.

The story of modern Baltimore is entirely unrelated to the city’s early history.  It consists in a simple but inspiring record of regeneration springing from disaster.  It is the story of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Galveston, of Dayton, and of many a smaller town:  a cataclysm, a few days of despair, a return of courage, and another beginning.

Imagine yourself being tucked into bed one night by your valet or your maid, as the case may be, calm in the feeling that all was secure:  that your business was returning a handsome income, that your stocks and bonds were safe in the strong box, that the prosperity of your descendants was assured.  Then imagine ruin coming like lightning in the night.  In the morning you are poor.  Your business, your investments, your very hopes, are gone.  Everything is wiped out.  The labor of a lifetime must be begun again.

Such an experience was that of Baltimore in the fire of 1904.

On the sickening morning following the conflagration two Baltimore men, friends of mine, walked down Charles Street to a point as near the ruined region as it was possible to go.

“Well,” said one, surveying the smoking crater, “what do you think of it?”

“Baltimore is gone,” was the response.  “We are off the map.”

How many citizens of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Galveston, of Dayton have known the anguish of that first aftermath of hopelessness!  How many citizens of Baltimore knew it that day!  And yet how bravely and with what magic swiftness have these cities risen from their ruins!  Was not Rome burned?  Was not London?  And is it not, then, time for men to learn from the history of other men and other cities that disaster does not spell the end, but is oftentimes another name for opportunity?

Always, after disaster to a city, come improvements, but because disaster not only cleans the slate but simultaneously stuns the mind, a portion of the opportunity is invariably lost.  The task of rebuilding, of widening a few streets, looks large enough to him who stands amidst destruction—­and there, consequently, improvement usually stops.  That is why the downtown boulevard system of Chicago has yet to be completed, in spite of the fact that it might with little difficulty have been completed after the Chicago fire (although it is only just to add that city planning was almost an unknown art in America at that time); and that also is why the hills of San Francisco are not terraced, as it was suggested they should be after the fire, but remain to-day inaccessible to frontal attack by even the maddest mountain goat of a taxi driver.