A great passage from The Freeman Book. It's from a review-essay of the Letters of Ambrose Bierce, by Van Wyck Brooks:
San Francisco, his home for a quarter of a century, he describes as “the paradise of ignorance, anarchy and general yellowness. . . . It needs,” he remarks elsewhere, “another quake, another whiff of fire, and–more than all else–a steady trade wind of grapeshot.” It was this latter–grapeshot is just the right word–that Bierce himself poured into that “moral penal colony,” the worst, as he avers, “of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs in our modern world”; and his collection of satirical epigrams shows us how much he detested it.
Both perceptive and prescient, that Bierce.
