CHAPTER VI
ADVANCE, CHICAGO!
Chicago possesses one exceedingly good hotel. We know this by experience. The other hotels in the city may be equally good, but we shall never try them. Having found one almost perfect hotel, we shall, whenever we visit that city again, go back to it. But I expect that all the other hotels there are good too, very good; for Chicago appears to take an interest in its hotels. In most cities, perhaps in all other cities, hotels are good or bad according as their managers are efficient or the reverse. The city itself does not care about its hotels any more than it cares about its bootmakers. A London bootmaker might provide very bad leather for the soles of a stranger's boots. "The Times" would not deal with that bootmaker in a special article. It might be very difficult to obtain hot water in one of the great London hotels—I have seen it stated, on the authority of an American, that it is very difficult—but London itself does not care whether it is or not. The soling of boots and the comfort of casual guests are, according to the generally prevailing view, affairs best settled betwen[** between] the people directly interested, the traveler on the one hand and the bootmaker or manager on the other. No one else thinks that he has a right to interfere.
Chicago takes a different view. It has a sense of civic responsibility for its hotels, possibly also for its bootmakers. I did not try the bootmakers and therefore cannot say anything certainly about them. But I am sure about the hotels. It happened that there was a letter awaiting my arrival at the hotel, the very excellent hotel, in which we stayed. This letter was not immediately delivered to me. I believe that I ought to have asked for it, that the hotel manager expects guests to ask for letters, and that I had no reasonable ground of complaint when the letter was not delivered to me. Nor did I complain. I am far too meek a man to complain about anything in a large hotel. I am desperately afraid of hotel officials. They are all much grander than I am and occupy far more important positions in the world. I should not grumble if a princess trod on my toe. Princesses have a right, owing to the splendour of their position, to trample on me. But I would rather grumble at a princess than complain to a head waiter or the clerk in charge of the offices of a large hotel. Princesses are common clay compared to these functionaries. But even if I were a very brave man, and even if I believed that one man was as good as another and I the equal of the manager of a large hotel, I should not have complained about the failure to deliver that letter. The hotel when we were there was very full, and full of the most important kind of people, doctors. It was not to be expected that such a trifle as a letter for me would engage the attention of anybody.
Next morning there was a paragraph in one of the leading Chicago papers about my letter and the manager of the hotel was told plainly, in clear print, that he must do his business better than he did. I was astonished when the manager, taking me solemnly apart, showed me the paragraph, astonished and terror-stricken. I apologized at once for daring to have a letter addressed to me at his hotel. I apologized for not asking for it when I arrived. I apologized for the trouble his staff had been put to in carrying the letter up to my room in the end. Then I stopped apologizing because, to my amazement, the manager began. He apologized so amply that I came gradually to feel as if I were not entirely in the wrong. Also I realized why it is that this hotel—and no doubt all the others in Chicago—is so superlatively good. Chicago keeps an eye on them. The press is alive to the fact that every citizen of a great city, even a hotel manager, should do not merely his duty but more, should practice counsels of perfection, perform works of supererogation, deliver letters which are not asked for.
The incident is in itself unimportant, but it seems to me to illustrate the spirit of Chicago. It is a great city and is determined to get things done right. It has besides, and this is its rare distinction, an unfaltering conviction that it can get things done right. Most communities are conscious of some limitations of their powers. For Chicago there are no limitations at all anywhere. Whatever ought to be done Chicago will do. Nothing is too small, nothing too great to be attempted and carried through. It may be an insignificant matter, like the comfort of a helpless and foolish stranger. It may be a problem against which civilized society has broken its teeth for centuries, like the evil of prostitution. Chicago is convinced that it can be got right and Chicago means to do it.
I admire this sublime self-confidence. I ought always to be happy when I am among men who have it, because I was born in Belfast and the first air I breathed was charged with exactly this same intensely bracing ozone of strong-willedness.
Belfast is very like Chicago. If a Belfast man were taken while asleep and transported on a magic carpet to Chicago, he would not, on waking up, feel that anything very strange had happened to him. The outward circumstances of life would indeed be different, but he would find himself in all essential respects at home. He would talk to men who said "We will," with a conviction that their "We will" is the last word which can or need be said on any subject; just as he had all his life before talked to men who said, "We won't," with the same certainty that beyond their "We won't" there was nothing.
Chicago is, indeed, greater than Belfast, not merely in the number of its inhabitants and the importance of its business, but in the fact that it asserts where Belfast denies. It is a greater and harder thing to say "Yes" than "No." But there is a spiritual kinship between the two places in that both of them mean what they say and are quite sure that they can make good their "yes" and "no" against the world. If all the rest of America finds itself up against Chicago as the British empire is at present up against Belfast, the result will be the bewilderment of the rest of America.
I was in Chicago only for a short time. I did not see any of the things which visitors usually see there. I went there with certain prejudices. I had read, like every one else, Mr. Upton Sinclair's account of the slaughter of pigs in Chicago. I had read several times over the late Mr. Frank Norris's "The Pit." I had read and heard many things about the wonderful work of Miss Jane Addams. I had a vague idea that Chicago was both better and worse than other places, that God and the devil had joined battle there more definitely than elsewhere, that the points at issue were plainer, that there was something nearer to a straight fight in Chicago between good and evil than we find in other places.
"We are here," says Matthew Arnold, "as on a darkling plain,