When a terrible fire makes a city desolate and a nation mourn, the investigation that follows usually shows that a little human foresight could have prevented it, or at least, lessened the horror of it all. If chemicals or dynamite are stored in any building in excess of what wise legislation declares is safe, some one has been cruelly careless. Perhaps it is some inspector who has been disloyal to his trust, by permitting bribes to chloroform his sense of duty. If the lack of fire-escapes adds its quota to the list of deaths, or if the avarice of the owner has made his building a fire-trap, public feeling becomes intense, the newspapers are justly loud in their protests, and in demands that the guilty ones be punished. "If the laws already on the statute books do not cover the situation," we hear from day to day, "new laws will be framed to make a repetition of the tragedy impossible"; we are promised all kinds of reforms; the air seems filled with a spirit of regeneration; the mercury of public indignation rises to the point where "fever-heat" seems a mild, inadequate term. Then, as the horror begins to fade in the perspective of the past, men go quietly back to their own personal cares and duties, and the mighty wave of righteous protest that threatened so much, dies in gentle lapping on the shore. What has been all men's concern seems soon to concern no one. The tremendous energy of the authorities seems like the gesture of a drunken man, that starts from his shoulder with a force that would almost fell an ox but when it reaches the hand it has expended itself, and the hand drops listlessly in the air with hardly power enough to disturb the serenity of a butterfly. There is always a little progress, a slight advance, and it is only the constant accumulation of these steps that is giving to the world greater dominion over the preventable. Constant vigilance is the price of the conquest of the preventable. We have no right to admit any wrong or evil in the world as necessary, until we have exhausted every precaution that human wisdom can suggest to prevent it. When a man with a pistol in his right hand, clumsily covered with a suspicious-looking handkerchief, moved along in a line of people, and presenting his left hand to President McKinley, pressed his weapon to the breast of the Chief Executive of the American people, some one of the secret service men, paid by the nation to guard their ruler, should have watched so zealously that the tragedy would have been impossible. Two Presidents had already been sacrificed, but twenty years of immunity had brought a dreamy sense of security that lessened the vigilance. We should emulate the example of the insurance companies who decline certain risks that are "extra hazardous."