The service of the police of Halifax was highly commendable. They worked for long periods with little rest to maintain public peace and order. The splendid service of the King's soldiers and sailors has already been considered. They were first and foremost in the work of rescue and of warning. Military orders to vacate the North End district as a precautionary measure followed hard upon the explosion. Military orders permitted the people to return. Within a few hours after the disaster the military established a cordon around the devastated district which no one was allowed to pass without an order, which citizens having business obtained at the City Hall. This was to prevent looting as well as to facilitate the search for the wounded pinned under the debris, and to permit the removal of the bodies of the killed. The burned and devastated area was policed by the military for about two months with the concurrence of civic authority. But catastrophe calls for much more than protection. It calls for a procedure, a guidance, a paternal care, and it calls for it at once. If we ask whether it be the function of government to take the foremost step of leadership in this care, the question is one for Political Science. If we ask the more sociological question whether governments actually and always do so, the answer is unhesitatingly--they do not. Says Cooley: "Like other phases of organization, government is merely one way of doing things, fitted by its character for doing some things, and unfitted for doing others."[134] This proved one of the things for which it was unfitted. Not one of the governmental authorities, civic, provincial, or federal, at once assumed and held authoritatively and continuously the relief leadership. Indeed it is a peculiar commentary that they were scarcely thought of as likely immediately to do so. It should be said, however, that the Deputy-mayor--the Mayor being absent from the city--was very active personally. While one of the controllers was himself replacing the dead fire-chief, the Deputy-mayor called an emergency meeting of citizens on the morning of the disaster, and another at three in the afternoon to consider what to do. This meeting of citizens was presided over by the Lieutenant-Governor, and at it, as already noticed, a beginning in relief organization was made. The committees, it will be remembered, were afterwards reformed upon a new basis on the advice of the American unit. But no civic resources were pledged to the people as was done at the Chicago fire. No moneys were then or subsequently appropriated. The Board of Health did not assert or assume the leadership in the unprecedented situation. The City Hall was indeed set up as the relief center temporarily, but the advice to remove it elsewhere was not successfully opposed. How little civic authority was retained under the disaster circumstances is evidenced by the following complaint. The Board of Control which was then the legal