into being within twenty years, or even less, after the ending of its fort days, and the time Lincoln came up from Springfield to attend the law courts, or to make speeches against Senator Douglas in the late fifties. Then stood the first Tremont Hotel, and the Sherman House, both of four stories, with much gilt and mirrors for decoration, and plenty of pride on the part of their managers, for they felt that New York had nothing better. Bridges now spanned the river; elevators and granaries all along its banks were overtopped by countless masts of sailing vessels, which bore grain and merchandise; while, back from the lake, smoke stacks spired above these. Such was the wealth and the lordship of Chicago, the magic, the stir and the pride of the city before 1860, with the Illinois and Michigan Canal finished, with railroads running west to Galena, and into Chicago from the East. The Erie Canal had served its turn, had brought its people to the new town, to Illinois; but now with steam the days moved with sevenleague boots, and Chicago left Milwaukee behind in the race, as it had distanced Detroit much more definitely years before. With an expansion to 300,000 people in thirtyfour years, Chicago now became a place of riotous trade, of great riches, with its Kentucky settlement on Ashland Avenue made up of the Harrisons and the Honorés and others, with its Hyde Park rapidly building, where lived Senator Trumbull, with its university founded by Senator Douglas, with its Prairie Avenue where the Fields, the Armours and the Pullmans had taken up their abode, that sunny street of

the sifted few, with its hotels and theaters, its gay palaces of drink and gaming, its Randolph Street always a sort of Rialto, where flourished tragedy and comedy to be blown around the resorts-and all of this went up in flame in a few hours.

It is an enthralling story by itself, a story that would take the hand of a Hugo or a Virgil to set down. Between nine o'clock one Sunday night and ten the following night, three and one half square miles of the city were burned to ashes, 17,000 buildings were destroyed, 100,000 people were rendered homeless and $200,000,000 worth of property vanished in flame and smoke. Panic-stricken multitudes carting or dragging what belongings they could gather up, flying from danger under a copper sky that scattered sparks about them and ignited the autumn leaves in the yards of the stately Chicago that was burning, this multitude mingled and massed along toward places of safety by the lake or into tugs on the river. Amid buildings that crashed to the flames, and where the cries of men and women rose with the blare of whistles and horns, they speeded their way; while those in the secure parts of town stood in their yards, or climbed to observatories to watch the destruction of the city they had built. As the Indian

tomahawk had ended the settlement of the first fort, so now it was fire that blotted out the Urbs in Horto, and made way for the beginning of iron and granite, for the splendid eighties, and the nineties of a million people and the World's Fair. Out of the fire came the horse age, and the impressive stability of Michigan Avenue between whose parked bor

ders the bright bits jingled and the varnished harness shone in the long procession of elegance transplanted from England and New York. This city rebuilt in the seventies and adorned in the eighties, with its new Palmer House, finer than before, its Richelieu of choicest wines and finest cuisine, its Auditorium designed by Sullivan, an original Chicago architect of a new school, its first sky-scrapers, its miles of houses and apartments and mansions, north, south and west, was the Chicago to which the World's Fair came, dedicated on the four-hundredth year to the day that the caravels of Columbus touched at Watling Island. That day, too, the Chicago of to-day, and the Chicago of the Burnham plan, was born, with the determination to make it as a whole what that city of a summer was a metropolitan splendor of domes and towers and marble vistas, of islands and outer drives in the lake, and stadiums and temples devoted to art and science. The verdict of history is that the World's Fair was the most beautiful of all the memorial exhibitions ever given. Its aspect can be summarized in two lines of Richard Watson Gilder, which celebrated his admiration for its triumphs: "Say not 'Greece is no more,' Greece flowers and all her temples

soar."

Then what was and what is Chicago? Going back to its first days in 1837, was it the speculators, the knaves and the irresponsible vulgarians who descended upon the place for their own transient advantage; or was Chicago the building-men who soon rescued the sand

hills for lawns about the handsome dwellings of that time, and filled the river with the masts of commerce, and dug the canal, and built the railroads? At the time of the fire, was Chicago the cut-throats and the thieves and scalawags who swarmed forth to prey upon helplessness, and whom to control, President Grant sent the Federal troops; or was Chicago then the men of the first days, still in middle life, who set about to rebuild the city and to make it better than ever? In the free and swaggering eighties, the eighties of expansion and robust virility, was Chicago the men who boodled to completion the baroque court-house composed of every known style of capital and pediment and frieze; was it the Chicago of the anarchist riots, that monstrously lied-about affair, giving the men involved and the city, too, an undeserved repute; was it a state of mind that flowered in the Cronin murder and other scandalous events that wafted their aroma over the whole country, or was it the work then being done to found the University of Chicago, to build the art museum, and to set in Jackson Park for the World's Fair, replicas of the ancient wonders of Athens and Pæstum; was it in the days of the Fair, the bootleggers and the whirlers shadow of the City Hall, or was it the of the roulette-wheel under the very music with which the Fair was opened and the Ode of Harriet Monroe which, with Moody's Ode to the city, sing the Chicago spirit more truly and more beautifully than any one else has done it? And when, as it was charged in the criminal court, certain men altered the wording of an ordinance for the construction of a

tunnel for wires, to make it read that they might bore one large enough for electric freight-cars, were they Chicago, or was it Chicago that took the dirt from this excavation and dumped it far out into the lake, making hundreds of acres of land for Grant Park, to be in readiness, as it turned out, for the definite Chicago planning of 1909? Who will grasp Chicago's nature will find himself with hands slipping as from the seaoiled body of Proteus. If he begins to characterize Chicago as brutal and sordid, he will bump up against the great work of her philanthropists, against her persistent will in esthetic creation, he will be confronted by a thousand manifestations of realized beauty in statuary and arches and halls of learning and libraries. If he seizes upon the analysis that Chicago is suburban in spirit, and finds the explanation in the fact that whole neighborhoods are made up of people from some county down-state, or from Iowa, who think and vote and worship as they did in the country, then he must reckon with the minds that are over these cultures, who are doing the work that will be remembered, even as the beauty of the World's Fair is remembered and preserved in pictures, while the motley throngs that entered its gates are forgotten, and have no memorial whatever. If he finally discovers that Chicago is ruled by merchants, then he must remember the trade that built Athens under Pericles, and Venice where "the merchants were the kings," who wed the sea with rings and built St. Mark's.

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Indeed, Chicago is and always has been too complex and too multiple to

be charactered by a single phrase. It was never a packing-town exclusively or predominantly; nor an iron-town; nor a lumber-town; it was never a town ruled altogether by Germans, by Irish, by Poles, by any particular religious sect, by Puritans, by lawless factions, by any one influence.

The truth is that Chicago has been expressed in the written word by the reports and plans of architects, such men as Burnham and Root; and oddly enough in newspaper almanacs which give the statistics of its achievements and its hopes-these rather than any creative writing whatever. There are people in the East and elsewhere who should believe that Pottawottomies still loiter about the public library of Chicago, since they indulge such grotesque notions about the city as a place of crime. There is crime. But who was it who said that the United States is a criminal country? He must be as blind as the member of a crime commission who cannot see exploiters and privilegists as criminals and their machinations as crimes; and no city of America has a monopoly of these. There are sharks in the sea, and there are the dogfish, their cousins, who take what the sharks are not interested in grabbing. The sharks make the law, and the dogfish avoid or violate it. It is so with human beings. But if it be the best way for the extermination of rats to clean up the building or wreck it; so to widen the streets of a city, to give it beauty, to secure the health and the comfort of its citizens is a way to preserve its laws; just as these achievements obey the higher mandates of the mind, and so set at work a rule of superior harmony.

This has been the objective for many years now of such men as James Simpson, John G. Shedd, Julius Rosenwald, John V. Farwell, Stanley Field, Carter H. Harrison, Charles L. Strobel, Edward F. Swift, and Charles H. Wacker, to mention only a few of the great committee of nearly two hundred men, merchants, capitalists, lawyers, architects, and men of affairs who have undertaken and prosecuted already to great conclusion the remaking of Chicago, and who to do so have taken studious lesson from the work of master builders of other cities in times past. What Baron Haussmann did for Paris, and before him the architects under Louis XIV; what Sir Christopher Wren tried to do for London in 1666 so to reclaim that city from the conditions which Macaulay so graphically described; what Vienna did, following the example of Paris, as expressed in the boulevards of Colbert, all these things the Chicago Commission has thoroughly canvassed. And as well it has considered the plan of L'Enfant for Washington, in order that Chicago as a city of three million people, or of thirteen million people in 1952, as prophesied, may move in a systematic arrangement of streets and may freely breathe by the opening of congested centers; and that with thoroughfares radiating from central points, and with public buildings of magnificent architecture set at the end of long and wide vistas; with the convenience and the health of the inhabitants safeguarded beyond that of any city, and with the desire for civic beauty satisfied by nobility in marble and bronze, Chicago may express itself to the inner core of its authentic spirituality.

What Napoleon I did for the illsmelling, narrow winding streets of criminal Paris, when he opened the Rue de Rivoli, swept away the medieval structures from the bridges across the Seine, and placed miles of new quays along its banks, is insignificant compared to the prodigious improvements which Chicago has planned. And seventeen major features of these plans have been accomplished in less than twenty years. Already Wacker Drive along the river has been completed at a cost of $22,000,000; and where the river once seeped along in the days of Marquette and the fort, and later was banked by the red walls of spicemills and wholesale houses, there is now a broad boulevard towered over by great sky-scrapers, while the river lies below inclosures and balustrades of stone. The river is to be straightened too, and bridges of architectural wonder thrown across it. Of things also accomplished, the Illinois Central tracks along the lake-front have been lowered and electrified, proving that the sheer growth of a city guided by esthetic vision will conceal an ugliness as bad as these tracks were, just as a wound may heal over by the processes of health. Grant Park, that dumping ground for the dirt of the freight tunnel, is well on the way toward becoming the center of a water-front which no city in the world can equal. A man but seventy years of age could remember the Chicago of the Marble Terrace, which stood on the present site of the Congress Hotel-the Marble Terrace where lived the aristocrats of the seventies and later, who could look from their windows across the Lake Front Park, over

which, in places, the water rippled to the east line of Michigan Avenue; while the Illinois Central ran over spiles to the station at the foot of Randolph Street. Now the railroad lies as if it had cut its way through the land, with Grant Park far beyond it into the lake, and with Lake Front Park a long settled place of lawn and statuary. When the Chicago Plan is finished there will be an outer yacht harbor spaced east of Grant Park, formed like a crescent, which will be a good place to view the sky-line of Michigan Avenue, and the Field Museum at its south, already finished, and the new Art Museum to be placed at the center, and the new Crerar Library to be built at the north; all of classic, harmonious architecture; not to speak of the great stadium already done, and the many monuments that are soon to adorn this acreage made since 1894. Far to the west, at Congress Street and Halstead, about a mile from Michigan Avenue, will stand the civic center with its administration building whose dome, like St. Peter's, will loom above the city, and from whose plaza of statuary and fountains boulevards will radiate, as from an axis, to the parks and the outer drives, many of which are already finished. In this colossal work of remaking Chicago, the acquisition of 30,000 acres of forest preserves, the building of the West Side railroad terminal, the widening of South Park Avenue and Twenty-second Street, which involved the shearing off or the wrecking of hundreds of houses these have been items. And the work goes steadily on, wrecking and widening and building, for all of

which the money comes steadily forward out of that Chicago that was massacred but came to life, and was burned but was soon beckoning to the world with higher and nobler walls. "Roaming in thought over the universe," said Walt Whitman, “I saw the little that is good steadily hastening toward immortality, and the vast all that is called evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead." No truer description can be given of Chicago's career.

And if it come to pass that Chicago lifts itself to be the richest and the most powerful city of the world, for which indeed its indomitable merchants and dreamers are making ready, to what shall it be attributed, outside of the man power and ambition which envision such a triumph and are working for it? It will be due to the inner properties of the air which blows about the city from the far west, from the prairies; and turning about, brings refreshment from the lake; air that in winter is cold indeed, but kindles spirits and brings energy and vigor; which in summer becomes balmy, becomes heated, changes about and sets the blood to rhythms; and in the autumns of fair days prolonged to December, quickens the pace of the money centers, and speeds the dreams of thinkers. And another thing is the soil. Chicago is a child of the soil; its feet are still in the soil, and will be till the soil gives no more of strength. Not the gods of rocky downs and granite ledges are here; but the gods of corn and wheat out of the rich loam. This makes Chicago a creature of Demeter the goddess of agriculture, of the laws and civilization.