THE CALAMITY AT CHICAGO.
.111IIE fearful event at Chicago, which caused the death probably
of hundreds, the impoverishment of at least some forty or fifty thousand people, who, no doubt, supposed themselves safe against poverty, and the reduction of, it is now said, nine square miles of city to ruin, has arisen apparently from the kick of a cow in a cowshed, occurring during a storm of wind, and when the preparations against fire in Chicago were exceptionally bad. The Chicago Tribune of September 27 contained a letter complaining bitterly of the small supply of water in the city, to which the editor had appended this remark :-■44A reporter of the Tribune yesterday called at the office of the Board of Public Works to ascertain the cause of the present small supply of water in all sections of the city, and was informed that it was occasioned by the getting out of order of the two largest engines at the waterworks. All the water now supplied our citizens has to be pumped by the smallest of the three engines belonging to the city,—an engine of only 450-horse power. During the summer months the two big engines, the one 1,200 and the other 600-horse power, were run up to their full speed, both night and day, and even then there was great complaint among the people who live in remote parts of the city of a scarcity of water." And this was in a city in which the pavements are mainly of wood. The penalty, which was fearful, of this negligence was not long in coming. On the following Sunday week after this statement was published, a boy took a kerosene lamp into a stable to milk a cow ; the cow kicked over the lamp, the burning liquid, after setting fire to the stable, ran out on to the wooden pavement of the street, which it ignited, and the southerly wind carried the fire into the heart of the city, all the most valuable part of which it has destroyed. It is said that some 100,000 persons were at once rendered homeless, that property to an amount the estimate of which appears to vary between thirty and sixty millions sterling was destroyed, and that one of the richest and grandest, as well as the most rapidly-built cities of the Union has all but utterly perished. The injury which the Prussians and Communists together did to Paris is as nothing to the injury which that kick- ing cow was the means of doing to Chicago. A number of vil- lages round Paris have no doubt been destroyed almost as com- pletely; but almost all the private property in Paris itself, almost all the wealth of the great city, even including the suburbs, is still in existence. Iu Paris itself not above 100 private houses were destroyed. In Chicago no less than 12,000 are stated to be utterly in ashes. A calamity, comparatively speaking, wholly unconnected with moral causes has swept away Chicago in a single day and night with a fearful completeness of execution that neither foreign nor civil hostility ventured to approach in France. Negligence — the preoccupation of busy merchants intent on their own affairs,—is the worst fault to which the conflagration of Chicago can be ascribed. The water system was out of repair ; the dangerous wooden-pavement system and the innumerable wooden houses of the city had constituted of course a permanent danger to which Chicago was more or less indifferent ; the cow's kick and the blustering wind, which often changed its quarter, we are told, as if expressly to scatter the flames in every direction, did the rest. When at last the rain caine to put a stop to the destruction, almost all that was worth preserving had disappeared. Had such e. •fate descended upon New York, more than ono of us would have half thought of it as a moral judgment, a "liquidation sociale," completer than any the mayor and controller of finance are likely to promote. But it has fallen on a city which had perhaps one of the best reputations in the Union for genuine com- mercial integrity and industry,—upon one of which, more than any other in the Northern States, Americans were wont to speak proudly as characteristic of their teeming energy and their marvellous power of rapid organization. A graphic article in the Daily News of Wednesday, to the writer of which Chicago was evidently well known, gives us this description of what is now at best bare walls, and mostly mere ashes :—"Nowhere in the world—not in Manchester, not in London, not in New York—were busier streets to be found The streets of shops and banks and theatres and hotels might stand a rivalry with those of any city in the world. Enormous piles of warehouses, with handsome and costly fronts ; huge 'stores,' compared with which Shool- bred's or Tarn's seem diminutive ; hotels as large as the Langham or the Louvre ; bookshops which are unsurpassed in London or Paris ; and theatres where Christine Nilsson found a fortune awaiting her such as the Old World could not offer,-- such were the principal features of that wonderful quarter which has just been reduced to ashes. Nor was Chicago wholly given up to business. Her avenues of private residences were—some, we trust, still are—as beautiful as any city can show. Michigan Avenue and Wabash Avenue were the streets where her merchant princes lived, and there is nothing to be seen in Paris, London, or New York to surpass either avenue in situation or in beauty. Michigan Avenue is a sort of Piccadilly, with a lake instead of a park under its drawing-room windows. The other great avenue was distinguished from almost any street of the kind in Europe or in the United States by the variety of its architecture. Mr. Ruskin himself might have acknowledged that in this civilized and modern street, at least, the curse of monotony did not pre- vail, and the yoke of the Italian style was not accepted." And the destruction of all this is the penalty, if penalty it be, of the collective thoughtlessness of busy citizens too intent on individual affairs to consider deeply enough the terrible danger to a great city of wooden pavements and an insufficient water-supply. Americans may well think that " the one shall be taken and the other loft" on principles extremely obscure to human eyes, and doubt for a moment of the divine govern- ment of a world in which Chicago burns to the ground while Paris is but severely scorched, and New York is still filling up, unscathed, the measure of her sins. Is the divine government a riddle utterly impenetrable by man, or can we in any degree dis- cover in such strange and terrible events any gleam of educating purpose, however little we may pretend to comprehend its scope ?
What strikes us at the very first is the tendency which men have, when gathered together in groat masses, and especially when rapidly gathering together in new masses, to merge all social vigilance and wariness in individual vigilance and wariness. Every man is so sharply on the look-out for success in the competition of life, that ho forgets the look-out which does not contribute so much to his own particular advantage as to the equal advantage of all. Every one has observed the comparative indifference to risk and danger which marks the headlong American speed, —the popularity of racing steamboats on the great rivers, the political chanciness which marks the American politics, the incredible and almost wilful blindness to the purpose of the South which rendered Secession possible, the reluctance to give any attention even to the wholesale swindling of the authorities of New York, the happy-go-lucky nature of the selection of political candidates, in a word, the collective carelessness which is mainly due, perhaps, to the concentrated weights of individual care, but which, whether that is so or not, seems to expect to keep all the advantages of great communities without giving any organized attention to guard against their proper dangers. The American genius is especially swift and vigilant in securing all the gain which common life, and common life on a large scale, gives. Education, trade, travel, literature, all go on with the most rapid steps where- ever Americans or, for that matter, Anglo-Saxons, are united ; but the vigilance which avails itself of new opportunities for common pleasure and convenience, is by no means rivalled by the vigilance which guards against the latent dangers and certain risks of these gigantic societies.
Yet unquestionably society has no common privileges except at the cost also of common dangers. As the vices of great societies are apt to make themselves felt before the positive virtues are called out which can alone grapple with them, so the physical dangers of great societies,—the dangers of famine, plague, and fire, —are apt to make themselves felt before the public sagacity, fore-
thought and vigilance are elicited which can alone keep them at a distance. Human beings are apt to feel safe in each others' pre- sence, whereas that very presence is very nearly quite as full of peril as of safety. All evil as well as all good is multiplied with the multiplication of human atoms in close relation with each other. And yet social and political improvidence is far more diffi- cult to cure, as all history shows, than individual improvidence. The men who insured their property in Chicago never thought of insuring the city against the danger of depending on insurances. The rashness of busy crowds and wealthy corporations is far greater than the rashness of individuals. And yet prudence and vigilance in societies is a higher, less selfish, one may say a more spiritual, virtue than prudence and vigilance in individuals and in families. The duties it suggests are far less urgently pressed upon the attention, and require a far more disinterested circumspection to be duly performed. Considerateness in guarding against dangers which may never affect ourselves,—which on the doctrine of chances are hardly ever likely to affect ourselves,—is one of the higher qualities of the true statesman, a virtue which requires a keen sense of the invisible, and a keen apprehension of that realm in the invisible which is concerned with others than ourselves. A new country, full of the sources of wealth, with inhabitants taken up in watching its giant strides from year to year, is the last to throw forward those vigilant glances into the future which detect lurking dangers and possible calamities. Its life is too vivid in the present to look fore and aft, and count the unpaid cost of all its gains. Especially in the capital of the richest and most rapidly progressive section of such a country is this tendency to ignore the perils of an eager and progressive society certain to be found, —this disposition to snatch at all the fruits of civilization without turning any thoughtful and anxious eye on its many dangers. Chicago was, no doubt, one of the most earnest, industrious, vigorous centres of civilization in the whole Union; but it was also one of the most go-ahead and confident, one of those least alive to the true moral difficulties and temptations of civilization. 'With societies, as with individuals, it is often those which have the noblest elements iu them which receive the earliest and severest warnings. To Chicago this has come in the shape of a frightful reminder of what we may call its physical heedlessness, its carelessness of the need and duty of keeping a vigilant guard against Nature, who deems to avail herself so cruelly of the multiplication of human ingenuities and energies to multiply also human perils. But a vigilance of this kind, which shcfuld always be on the watch against the new physical dangers which great human societies involve, would certainly produce a guardedness of character all but certain to ex- tend into the moral as well as the physical sphere. A city which had once fairly become watchful over the physical wel- fare of its inhabitants would soon be found providing against snob huge moral evils as have now almost overwhelmed New York. Disinterested vigilance against physical dangers is a quality of too spiritual a kind to exist without a moral self-possession and cir- cumspection that would bear fruits in higher spheres. Is it fanci- ful to suppose that Chicago has had in this awful warning a lesson which may cause a new and more thoughtful city to rise on her ruins,—a city in which not only will fire never again be able to commit like ravages, but where, perhaps as a consequence, vigilance against moral plagues as destructive and even more terrible than fire, will guard the new city against following in the evil footsteps of the great capital of Transatlantic trade and corruption?
Previous page
