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.