There should be two electric mains entering all places of amusement, one from the front, with switchboard in box office, controlling entire auditorium and exits, and one on stage, to be used for theatrical purposes. All city officials and employes should familiarize themselves with city ordinances as they relate to their respective departments, and pass a rigid and signed examination on same before they are given positions. This same rule should be made to apply to those holding office. FIRE DEPARTMENT. All theaters and public places should be supplied with at least two city firemen, who shall be under the direction of the fire department and paid by the proprietors of said places. We recommend that the office and detail work of the fire department, as imposed on the fire marshal, be made a separate and distinct work from fire fighting, as it is hardly to be expected of any fire marshal to give good and efficient service in both of these branches. Also a police officer in full uniform detailed in and about said place at each and every performance. In testimony wherof, the said coroner and jury of this inquest have hereunto set their hands the day and year aforesaid. L. H. MEYER, Foreman, PETER BYRNES, J. A. CUMMINGS, WALTER D. CLINGMAN, JOHN E. FINN, GEORGE W. ATKIN. JOHN E. TRAEGER, Coroner. CHAPTER I. THE STORY OF THE FIRE. No disaster, by flood, volcano, wreck or convulsion of nature has in recent times aroused such horror as swept over the civilized world when on December 30, 1903, a death-dealing blast of flame hurtled through the packed auditorium of the Iroquois theater, Chicago, causing the loss of nearly 600 lives of men, women and children, and injuries to unknown scores. Strong words pale and appear meaningless when used in describing the full enormity of this disaster, which has no recent parallel save in the outbreaks of nature's irresistible forces. There have been greater losses of life by volcanoes, earthquakes and floods, but no fire horror of modern times has equaled this one, which in a brief half-hour turned a beautiful million-dollar theater into an oven piled high with corpses, some burned and mutilated and others almost unmarked in death. Coming, as it did, in the midst of a holiday season, when the second greatest city in the United States was reveling in the gaiety of Christmas week, this sudden transformation of a playhouse filled with a pleasure-seeking throng into an inferno filled with shrieking living and mutilated dead, came as a thunderbolt from a clear sky.