The first mood of the stricken city was one of despair. Then anger mounted. Scapegoats were sought. Some laid the blame on the piped gas that had come into vogue ten years before. Samuel Leggett had been the first to light his house with the explosive and his guests had felt that they took their lives in their hands when they accepted his hospitality. He had been one of the leaders of the Bronx River party, too. Others complained that the fire had gone beyond control because the unchecked insolence and greed of the builders had led them to pile up structures as high as five or six stories. So an ordinance was passed forbidding future Babel towers to rise above the fourth floor. The true cause of the fire was proclaimed from many pulpits as a magnificent rebuke from heaven upon a city in which extravagance had gone mad and sin flourished exceedingly. One text for a scathing sermon was: “Is there evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?” Another preacher chose the fall of the tower of Siloam upon sinners as his parallel. But if God punished the new Nineveh, it paid him little heed, for a revel of crime ensued; burglaries were countless. Vice ruled and people danced and drank with desperate zeal. More amazing yet, a fever of prosperity followed. When lots in the burned district were offered at auction, the first of them brought prices above anybody’s dreams. A panic of enthusiasm made skyrockets of values. People who had a little cash laid it down as a first payment on property far beyond their means, and then borrowed money to build with. New shops and tenements began to shoot up, and of a statelier sort than before. Brick and marble replaced wood, and the builders were so active that the editor of the _Mirror_ was reminded of his classics and quoted the scene in Vergil where Æneas watched the masons and architects of Tyre raising Carthage to glory. It was ominous, however, that most of these buildings were founded upon mortgages. There was frenzy, not sanity, in the land speculation. Wildcat banks were opened everywhere. Prices for all things soared till flour reached fifteen dollars a barrel and wheat two dollars a bushel. The poor grew restive. Everybody grew restive. War broke out against the Catholics. In the Protestant pulpits they were assailed as worse than atheists. The monasteries and nunneries were described as dens of vice, and the populace was finally so aroused that a Protestant mob attacked Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and would have set it afire if it had not been turned into a fortress of armed men with rifles aimed through walls crenelated for defense. There was a riot also in a theatre.