In our dealings with Japan, as will be shown hereafter, we are sitting on an open keg of gunpowder, lighting matches apparently without the remotest idea of the danger, or of the way to eliminate it. But the situation on the Pacific Coast with reference to Japan is not the first instance of similar risks that have been run with most appalling losses as a consequence. The danger of an earthquake in San Francisco was known to everybody. Likewise it must have been known, if the slightest thought had been given to it, that an earthquake might disrupt the water system of the city and make it impossible to quench a fire that might be started by an earthquake. As San Francisco is now heedless of the need for a policy that will really settle the Japanese trouble, instead of aggravating it, so she was heedless of the earthquake danger. That heedlessness cost the city $300,000,000 in entirely unnecessary damage caused by fire. San Francisco was destroyed by fire, not by the earthquake. The earthquake was unavoidable, the fire was wholly preventable. That sort of heedlessness is typical of the American people. Busy with the present, they take no thought of the future. Every city in the United States which is liable in any year to a great flood, is equally liable to a great fire--a fire which might as completely destroy it as the San Francisco fire destroyed that city, because, owing to the flood, all the means provided for fire protection when there is no flood, would be rendered useless by the flood. Yet every such flood-menaced city in the United States stolidly runs the risk. No general precautions are taken to prevent such destruction, though it must be recognized as being possible at any time. Great floods will rarely follow one another in the same place. For this reason, flood protection for a city which has already suffered from a disastrous flood, like Dayton, is no more important than similar protection for all other flood-menaced cities. The only way to safeguard against floods, and the consequent risk of fire losses in flood-menaced cities, is that _all such cities_ should be completely protected against floods, under a nation-wide policy for flood protection and prevention. When appeal is made to Congress for legislation providing for such a policy and for the appropriations necessary to make it effective, we are told that so much money is required for military expenditures that none can be spared for protection against floods. Are we to go on for the next ten years doing as we have done in the last ten, and spend another billion dollars for the army and fortifications, while floods ravage unchecked? If we had been getting actual protection from foreign invasion for that billion dollars, there might have been some justification for its expenditure; but we are getting neither protection from foreign invasion nor protection from flood invasion.