“The principal feature is this—The Southern Pacific company has ordered a steel bridge built across the bay ten feet higher than the trestlework on the late bridges. The company has ordered also a doubling up of forces to continue and improve their wharves, and with this note of encouragement from the great enterprise upon which so much depends the whole situation is cleared up. AN EXCELLENT PORT. “Our wharves will be rebuilt, the sanitary condition of the city will be perfected; streets will be laid with material superior to that destroyed, new vigor and life will enter the community with the work of construction, and the products of the twenty-one States and Territories contiguous will pour through the port of Galveston. “We have now, through the action of this storm, with all its devastation, thirty feet of water on the bar, making this port the equal, if not the superior, of all others on the American seaboard. The island has stood the wrack of the greatest storm convulsion known in the history of any latitude, and there is no longer a question of the stability of the island’s foundation. If a wind velocity of one hundred and twenty miles an hour and a water volume of fifteen feet in some places upon the island did not have the effect of washing it away, then there is no wash to it. “Galveston island is still here, and here to stay, and it will be made in a short time the most beautiful and progressive city in the Southwest. This may be esteemed simply a hopeful view, but the conditions existing warrant acceptance of the view to the fullest extent. “The ‘News’ will not deal with what is needed from a generous public to the thousands of suffering people now left with us. The dead are at rest. There are twenty thousand homeless people here, whose necessities at this time are great indeed. Assistance is needed for them in the immediate future. The great works of material and industrial energy will take care of themselves by the attraction here presented for the profitable employment of capital. We were dazed for a day or two, but there is no gloom here now as to the future. Business has already been resumed.” PLAN TO PROTECT GALVESTON. Can the city of Galveston, almost obliterated by the recent storm, be protected from all future assaults by the Gulf? Colonel Henry M. Robert, United States Corps of Engineers, and divisional engineer of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, who is stationed here at present, says that Galveston can be absolutely protected from every storm by a sea wall built along the Gulf front.