Within the grounds there is little extortion, thanks to the firmness of the ruling powers.
CAFÉ IN THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE.
But let not the Chicagoan whose eye may fall upon these lines suppose for an instant that they are intended as reflections on his character. The city that secured the prize is simply fulfilling its inevitable destiny. Had New York drawn the plum we should have witnessed a worse extortion, with the added mortification of a much inferior exhibition. Moreover, there is no public spirit in New York, and there is a great deal of it in Chicago. This sentiment alone is more than enough to make the difference between success and failure. The woods are full of citizens willing to begin at sunrise and discourse to you until midnight of the wonders of Chicago. In ordinary times this burning desire to impart just that kind of information is not always appreciated by the outside world; but in times of fairs the spirit that prompts it becomes a mighty engine. It was soon demonstrated that these citizens could work as well as talk, and as a result the White City has risen as from a fairy’s wand.
The important question for the individual citizen is whether it is worth his while to go to this fair. And this, of course, depends altogether upon his purse, his stomach, his back, his legs, nerves, wife, children, and business. He may never have another such opportunity for mental expansion and physical discomfort. It is a marvel of architectural beauty. It is days of instruction, of art and science, of surprise and exasperation, of mental development, fatigue, and financial ruin. In the end his personal preferences, however, will probably have little to do with it. All the world are going, and he must go too.
THE ART OF THE WHITE CITY
By Will H. Low
ON the way west to the White City, to “the stately pleasure-dome decreed,” where the arts of civilization by the unwritten law of International Expositions hold their court, the observant traveller finds abundant food for thought. Beyond Niagara, assuming his point of departure to be New York, he sees in the landscape through which he is whirled a continuous sweep of flat farming land, but little water; fences everywhere, trees sparsely scattered, and plain box-like houses telling only of shelter; abundant barns differing little from the dwellings, and from time to time towns of varied nomenclature ranging from Delhi to Kalamazoo. Through the horizontal blur caused by the speed of the train through which all this is seen, there appear, principally about the stations, figures which lend a languid interest to the dead level of monotony.
The human interest of the picture, however, tells the same story as the landscape—a story of hard work, of material reward, an acquiescence in the law by which labor gains bread and shelter, and little else. Occasionally, in the immediate vicinity of the stations, there is some attempt at adornment, generally confined to “tidying up” the surroundings; but around the farm-houses few or no flowers, little or no attempt to beautify the home, nothing of the almost frantic suburban effort of the East which has made the country kaleidoscopically varied with color, for the most part bad, yet giving hope that the next generation will do better, and pointing at least to a desire for beauty. Individual effort, unseen along the route, may be slandered by the preceding, but such for many monotonous miles seemed the foreground of the picture we were journeying to see.
At last a plain, varied by marshes, through which boarded walks running at right angles, with an occasional house here and there, testified to the various suburban excrescences of a great city; then a dome or two, towers, flags fluttering in the sun, innumerable trains, clangor of bells and shrieking of whistles; and with Chicago seven miles away, hidden in a pall of smoke, the White City was at hand.