Since the time that civilized man first met with fellow man to enjoy the work of the primitive playwright, humanity has paid a toll of human life for its amus.e.m.e.nts. Oftener than history tells the tiny flicker of a tongue of flame has thrown a gay, laughing audience into a wild, struggling mob, and instead of the curtain which would have been rung down on the comedy on the stage, a pall of black smoke covered the struggles of the living and dying.

Of all the theater disasters of history, none ever occurred in America equaling the loss of life in the Iroquois fire. Only two in the history of the civilized world surpa.s.s it. There have been fires accompanied by greater loss of life, but not among theater audiences.

But the grand total of persons killed in theater holocausts is large and the saddest comment on this list is that most of the victims were from holiday audiences of women and children. Lehman's playhouse in St.

Petersburg, Russia, was destroyed in Christmas week, 1836, and 700 persons lost their lives. The Ring theater, Vienna, Austria, was destroyed Dec. 8, 1881, and 875 persons lost their lives. These are the only theater holocausts whose deadliness surpa.s.ses that of the Iroquois.

To all have been the same accompaniments of panic, futile struggle and suffocation. In the last century with the introduction of the modern style of playhouse, these fatal fires have increased. The annals of the stage are replete with dark pages that cause the tragedy of the mimic drama depicted behind the footlights to pale and shrivel into comparative nothingness.

Perhaps it is a fatal legacy from the time when civilized society gathered in its marble coliseums and amphitheaters to witness the mortal combats of human soldiers or the death struggles of Christians waging a vain battle against famished wild beasts. Whatever it may be, death has always stalked as the dread companion of the G.o.d of the muse and drama.

An English statistician published six years ago a list of fires at places of public entertainment in all countries in the preceding century. He showed that there had been 1,100 conflagrations, with 10,000 fatalities, and he apologized for the incompleteness of his figures. Another authority says that in the twelve years from 1876 to 1888 not less than 1,700 were killed in theater disasters in Brooklyn, Nice, Vienna, Paris, Exeter and Oporto, and that in every case nearly all the victims were dead within ten minutes from the time the smoke and flame from the stage reached the auditorium. As in the Iroquois fire, it was mainly in the balconies and galleries that death held its revels.

Fire wrought havoc at Rome in the Amphitheater in the year 14 B. C., and the Circus Maximus was similarly destroyed three times in the first century of the Christian era. Three other theaters were razed by flames in the same period, and Pompeii's was burned again almost two centuries later, but the exact loss of life is not recorded in either instance. The Greek playhouses, built of stone in open s.p.a.ces, were never endangered by fire.

No theaters were built on the modern plan until in the sixteenth century in France, and not until the seventeenth did any catastrophe worthy of record occur. When Shakespeare lived plays were generally produced in temporary structures, sometimes merely raised platforms in open squares, and it was after his time that scenic effects began to be amplified and the use of illuminants increased. Thus it was that dangers, both to players and auditors, were vastly increased.

In the Teatro Atarazanas, in Seville, Spain, many people were killed and injured at a fire in 1615. The first conflagration of this kind in England worth noting happened in 1672, when the Theater Royal, or Drury Lane, standing on the site of the playhouse in which "Mr. Bluebeard" was produced before it was brought to Chicago, was burned to the ground. Sixty other buildings were destroyed, but no loss of life is recorded.

Two hundred and ten people lost their lives and the whole Castle of Amalienborg, in Copenhagen, was laid in ashes in 1689 from a rocket that ignited the scenery in the opera house. Eighteen persons perished at the theater in the Kaizersgracht, Amsterdam, in 1772, and six years later the Teatro Colisseo, at Saragossa, Spain, went up in flames and seventy-seven lives were lost. The governor of the province was among the victims.

Twenty players were suffocated in the burning of the Palais Royal in Paris in 1781.

In the nineteenth century there were twelve theater fires marked by great loss of life, and the first of these occurred in the United States. At Richmond, on the day after Christmas in 1811, a benefit performance of "Agnes and Raymond, or the Bleeding Nun," was being given, and the theater was filled with a wealthy and fashionable audience. The governor of Virginia, George W. Smith, ex-United States Senator Venable, and other prominent persons were in the audience and were numbered among the seventy victims. The last act was on when the careless hoisting of a stage chandelier with lighted candles set fire to the scenery. Most of those killed met death in the jam at the doors.

The Lehman Theater and circus in St. Petersburg was the scene of a fire in 1836, in which 800 people perished. A stage lamp hung high ignited the roof, a panic ensued, and there was such a mad rush that most of the people slew each other trying to get out. Those not trampled to death were incinerated by the fire that rapidly enveloped the temporary wooden building.

A lighted lamp, upset in a wing, caused a stampede in the Royal Theater, Quebec, June 12, 1846, and 100 people were either burned or crushed into lifelessness. The exits were poor and the playhouse was built of combustible material. Less than a year later the Grand Ducal Theater at Carlsruhe, Baden, Germany, was destroyed by a fire, due to the careless lighting of the gas in the grand ducal box. Most of the 150 victims were suffocated. Between fifty and one hundred people met a fiery death in the Teatro degli Aquidotti at Leghorn, Italy, June 7, 1857. Fireworks were being used on the stage and a rocket set fire to the scenery.

One of the most serious fires from the standpoint of loss of life was that in the Jesuit church of Santiago, South America, in 1863. Fire broke out in the building during service. A panic started and the efforts of the priests to calm the immense crowd and lead them quietly from the edifice were vain. The few doors became jammed with a struggling ma.s.s of men, women and children. The next day 2,000 bodies were taken from the church, most of them suffocated or trampled to death.

The Brooklyn theater fire was long memorable in this country. Songs, funeral marches and poems without number were written commemorating the sad event. Vastly different from the Iroquois horror, most of the victims of the Brooklyn theater were burned beyond recognition. At Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn there now stands a marble shaft to the unidentified victims of the holocaust.

Kate Claxton was playing "The Two Orphans" at Conway's Theater in Brooklyn on the night of Dec. 5, 1876. In the last scene of the last act Miss Claxton, as Louise, the poor blind girl, had just lain down on her pallet of straw, when she saw above her in the flies a tiny flame. An actor of the name of Murdoch, on the stage with her, saw it about the same time, and was so excited that he began to stammer his lines. Miss Claxton tried to rea.s.sure him and partly succeeded.

Then the audience realized that the theater was on fire, and a movement began. The star, with Mr. Murdoch and Mrs. Farren, joined hands, walked to the footlights and begged the audience to go out in an orderly manner.

"You see, we are between you and the fire," said Miss Claxton. The people were proceeding quietly, when a man's voice shouted, "It is time to be out of this," and every one seemed seized with a frenzy. The main entrance doors opened inwardly, and there was such a jam that these could not be manipulated.

The crowds from the galleries rushed down the stairways and fell or jumped headlong into the struggling ma.s.s below. Of the 1,000 people in the theater 297 perished. They were either burned, suffocated or trampled to death. The actor Murdoch was one of the victims.

That same year, 1876, a panic resulted in the Chinese theater of San Francisco from a cry of fire. A lighted cigar which someone playfully dropped into a spectator's coat pocket caused a smell of burning wool. The audience became panic stricken and rushed madly for the exits. At the time there were about 900 Americans in the auditorium, and of this number one-quarter were seriously injured. The fire itself was of no consequence.

The destruction of the Ring theater at Vienna, Dec. 8, 1881, remains the greatest horror of the kind in the history of civilization. It was preceded on March 23 of the same year, by the burning of the Munic.i.p.al theater in Nice, Italy, caused by an explosion of gas, and in which between 150 and 200 people perished miserably, but the magnitude of the Vienna holocaust made the world forget Nice for the time. The feast of the Immaculate Conception was being celebrated by the Viennese, and Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffman," an opera bouffe, was the play. The audience numbered 2,500.

Fire was suddenly observed in the scenery, and a wild panic started. An iron curtain, designed for just such emergencies, was forgotten, and the flames, which might thus have been confined to the stage, spread furiously through the entire building. The scene was changed from light-hearted revelry, with gladsome music, to one of lurid horror.

The exits from the galleries were long and tortuous and quickly became choked. As in the Iroquois theater fire, those who had occupied the gallery seats were the ones who lost their lives. But few escaped from the galleries. The great majority of the spectators were burned beyond recognition by their nearest relatives. One hundred and fifty were so charred that they were buried in a common grave, and the city's mourning was shared by all the world.

The next fire of this nature to attract the world's attention and sympathy was the destruction of the Circus Ferroni at Berditscheff, Russian Poland.

Four hundred and thirty people were killed and eighty mortally injured.

Many children were crushed and suffocated in the jam, and horses and other trained animals perished by the score. This was on Jan. 13, 1883, and the origin of the conflagration was traced to a stableman who smoked a cigarette while lying in a heap of straw.

TWO GREAT PARISIAN HORRORS.

The burning of the Opera Comique in Paris, May 25, 1887, was a spectacular horror. Here again an iron curtain that would have protected the audience was not lowered. The first act of "Mignon" was on, when the scenery was observed to be ablaze. The upper galleries were transformed into infernos, in which men knocked other men and women down and trampled them in their eagerness to save themselves, while the flames reached out and enveloped them all.

Many of the actors and actresses escaped only in their costumes, and some rushed nude into the streets. The scenes in the thoroughfares where men and women in tights and ball dresses and men in gorgeous theatrical robes mingled with the naked, and the dead and dying were strewn about, made a picture fantastically terrible. The official list of dead was seventy-five, but many others died from the fire's effects.

The theater at Exeter, England, burned Sept. 5, 1887, was ignited from gas lights, and so much smoke filled the edifice in a short time that near 200 were suffocated in their seats. They were found sitting there afterward, just as though they were still watching the play. This was the eleventh, and the Oporto fire the twelfth of the big conflagrations of the country.

One hundred and seventy dead were taken from the ruins of the Portuguese playhouse after the flames which destroyed it on the evening of March 31, 1888, had been subdued. Many sailors and marine soldiers in the galleries used knives to kill persons standing in their way, and scores of the victims were found with their throats cut.

Ten years after the Opera Comique fire occurred the greatest of all Parisian horrors, the destruction by flames of the charity bazar, May 4, 1897. Members of the n.o.bility, and even royalty, were among the victims.

All of fashionable Paris were under the roof of a temporary wooden edifice known to visitors to the exposition of 1889 as "Old Paris." The annual bazar in the interest of charity had always been one of the most imposing of the spring functions. The wealthy and distinguished, t.i.tled and modish were there in larger numbers than on any previous occasion.

The fire broke out with a suddenness that so dazed everyone that the small chance of escape from the flimsy structure was made even less. d.u.c.h.esses, marquises, countesses, baronesses and grand dames joined in the mad rush for the exits. The men present are said to have acted in a particularly cowardly manner, knocking down and trampling upon women and children. The death list of more than 100 included the d.u.c.h.esses d'Alencon and De St.

Didier, the Marquise de Maison, and three barons, three baronesses, one count, eleven countesses, one general, five sisters of charity and one mother superior. The d.u.c.h.ess d'Alencon was the favorite sister of the Empress of Austria and had been a fiance of the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. The d.u.c.h.ess d'Uzes was badly burned. The shock of the news and the death of his niece, the d.u.c.h.ess d'Alencon, accounted for the death on May 7 of the Duc d'Aumale.

The Gaiety Theater in Milwaukee on November 5, 1869, furnished more than thirty victims to the fire fiend, but only two of these were burned to death. The Central Theater in Philadelphia was destroyed April 28, 1892, and six persons perished. A panic occurred at the Front Street playhouse in Baltimore December 27, 1895, among an audience composed entirely of Polish Jews. There was no fire, but a woman who had seen a bright light on the stage thought there was, and her cries caused a stampede that resulted in twenty-four deaths.

Statisticians show that theaters as a rule do not attain an old age, but that their average life in all countries is but twenty-two and three-fourths years. In the United States the average is but eleven to thirteen years, and here almost a third are destroyed before they have been built five years. More playhouses feed the flames just prior to and after than during performances, because of the added precautions of employes.

Two deadly conflagrations occurred in New York in 1900. The first the Windsor hotel fire, which resulted in the death of 80 persons. Fire broke out in the old hotel on Fifth avenue about midnight. With lightning rapidity the flames shot up the light and air shafts, filling the rooms with smoke and making them as light as day. The guests suddenly aroused from sleep became panic stricken. The fire department was unable to throw up ladders and give aid as fast as frightened faces appeared at the windows. The result was that many jumped to death. They were picked up dead and dying in the streets. Others ran from their rooms into the fire-swept hallways and were burned to death.

A short time later fire broke out one afternoon on the docks across the river from New York at Hoboken. The fire was on a pier piled high with combustible material. It burned like powder, spreading to the ocean liners tied to the pier and the efforts of the fire department were not effective in checking it. The cables which held the blazing vessels to the piers burned through and they drifted into the river, carrying fire and death among the shipping. Longsh.o.r.emen unloading and loading the vessels jumped in panic into the river. Others found themselves cut off from both land and water by the flames on all sides and were burned like rats in a trap.

It was estimated that 300 lives were lost. Many bodies were never recovered and others were found miles down the river.

Property losses are seldom proportionate to the financial losses from fire. In the Iroquois theater fire the property loss was almost inconsequential, while at the burning of Moscow by the Russians, Sept. 4, 1812, the property loss amounted to more than $150,000,000, while no lives were lost.

Constantinople, with its squalid and crowded streets, has always been a fruitful spot for fires. They are of annual occurrence and as the Turkish fire department is a travesty, are usually of considerable magnitude. The great fire of that city was in 1729, when 12,000 houses were destroyed and 7,000 persons burned to death. Aug. 12, 1782, a three days' fire started in which 10,000 houses, 50 corn mills and 100 mosques were burned and 100 lives lost. In February of the same year, 600 houses were burned, and in June 7,000 more. Fires are the best safeguards for Constantinople's health.

Great Britain has had comparatively few fires. In 1598 one at Tiverton destroyed 400 houses and 33 lives. In 1854 50 persons were killed at Gateshead. The great fire of London raged from Sept. 2 to 6, 1666. It began in a wooden building in Pudding Lane and consumed the buildings on 436 acres, blotting out 400 streets, 13,200 houses, St. Paul's and 86 other churches, 58 halls and all public buildings, three of the city gates and four stone bridges. The property loss was $53,652,500, while only six persons were killed.

Nearly every large city of the United States has had its great fire. That of Boston was on Nov. 9 and 10, 1872. Fire started at Summer and Kingston streets and 65 acres were burned over. The property loss was about $75,000,000 and there was no loss of life.

The great fire in New York began in Merchant street, Dec. 16, 1835. No lives were lost, but the property loss was $15,000,000 and 52 acres were devastated, 530 buildings being destroyed. Ten years later a much smaller fire in the same district caused the death of 35 persons.

July 9, 1850, thirty lives were lost in Philadelphia, and February 8, 1865, twenty persons were killed by another fire. Large fires in that city have almost invariably been accompanied by loss of life.

As the result of a Fourth of July celebration in 1866, nearly half of Portland, Md., was swept away by fire. The property loss was $10,000,000, but there was no loss of life. In September and October of 1871 forest fires raged in Wisconsin and Michigan. An immense territory was swept over and more than 1,000 persons lost their lives.

The greatest fire of modern times was the one which started in Chicago, October 8, 1871. A strip through the heart of the city, four miles long and a mile and a half wide, was burned over. The total loss was $196,000,000 and 250 persons lost their lives. By the fire 17,450 buildings were destroyed and 98,860 persons were made homeless. Within four years the entire burned district had been rebuilt.

Fires in Chicago attended with loss of life have been of increasing frequency in the past few years. Fire in the Henning & Speed building on Dearborn street, in 1900, caused four girls to lose their lives. Since it and before the Iroquois disaster have come: The St. Luke Sanitarium horror, 10 lives lost, 43 injured; the Doremus laundry explosion, 8 lives lost; the American Glucose Sugar refinery blaze, 8 killed; Northwestern railroad boiler explosion, 8 killed, Stock Yards boiler explosion, 18 killed, and about a year ago the Lincoln hotel fire, 14 visiting stockmen suffocated.

In view of this terrible array of suffering and death, it would seem that no precaution could be too great to avert future calamities. But although human life is beyond price, it is probable that the world at large will move on very much in the same old way--an arousing and an upheaval of public sentiment for a time after the burned and maimed have been laid away, and then a gradual return of carelessness. It would seem impossible, however, that the United States could forget for many generations the Iroquois disaster, and that it must result in a final reform of all arrangements looking to the safety of theater goers.