We artists of the Exposition were given a very smart banquet by the Chamber of Commerce of Chicago. This brought to mind a story which I told to Mr. Armour, much to his delight. A young girl calls on a woman friend and talks to her little boy, who is taking care of his baby sister in the carriage. She says to him:
“JUSTICE”
Center Panel by Edward Simmons, Criminal Courts Building, New York
Copyright by Edward Simmons; from a Copley Print
Copyright by Curtis & Cameron, Publishers, Boston
“Won’t you give the baby to me and you can come and see her at my house?”
“No,” he answered, “she’d starve to death. Your dress buttons behind.”
To me the baby is the fine arts, and it has always seemed that America’s gown buttons behind. Heretofore, the guilds of Europe and certain business men have done so, but I believe that this banquet was the first time in the history of mankind that commerce has ever honored the fine arts.
Often after the day’s work was done we would go out to the Argo—a club in a real ship tied to the end of a long wharf. Our hosts were the brains of Chicago—a famous architect, great manufacturers, a noted editor, and among others a banker who afterward sat in the Cabinet at Washington. One started down the railway tracks—no path—cars shunting across the way. Finally, one saw the ship looming up. As one neared, noises came of the tackle; they were evidently coaling. Once close in under the belly, a big port opened very much like the holes in the bows of the lumber vessels at the wharf in Bangor. A stair before one, stewards, a warm welcome from the hosts. Then a great waxed floor, a perfect table, and a perfect dinner. Music, dancing, when some one would say:
“How about the lake?”
All would start for the bulwarks, and there below lay the “detachable Argo,” a small clipper steam yacht. The moon, dancing lights, coming and going (Chicago was the biggest port in tonnage in the United States), there was never anything like it!
This fair at Chicago, of which Besant, the writer, said, “No Roman Emperor ever saw such pomp,” was for the world at large an advertisement of what we had to show them; but the Argo, with its pleasures of sight and sound, good wine, beautiful women, congenial company, was an expression of our hosts’ (the Argonauts) private pleasures. One would meet a band of foreign commissioners, their decorations gleaming on their breasts, bowing over the hand of the daughter of a Senator, Governor, or humble voter. No European country with its years of bacterial history could have produced this group—an emanation of the humus of our great virgin forests with a soil as yet undefiled.