Chicago, the city of the French portage, Chicago, which despite all that casual visitors see and say of it, was, I contend, best defined by Harriet Martineau as a "great, embryo poet," moody, wild, but bringing about results, exulting that he—for he is a masculine poet—has caught the true spirit of things of the past and has had sight of the depths of futurity. But it is only now that the brooding poet is coming to express himself in verses that are recognized for their beauty.
Chicago, the field of the wild onions, threaded by La Rivière de l'Ail, the place of the shambles, the capital of the golden calf. That is her fame.
Only recently I read in a book which I found in Paris, written by an English traveller, that Chicago stands apart from all other cities in that "her people are really on earth to make money"; that, magnificent as she is in many ways, chiefly in distances, she is "too busy money-making to attend to civic improvements" or to have a "keen affection for worthier things."
I have gone a hundred times in and out of that dirty, unkempt city, swept only by the winds, one would think, and I know its worst, its physical, moral, political worst. But if the people there have worshipped the golden calf in their wilderness, they have now drunk of the dust of their first image, and I should be disposed to say that nowhere among American cities is there a keener affection for worthier things showing itself.
Again I shall have to admit that this "affection" is not the spontaneous expression of the entire democratic community. As in Pittsburgh, a comparatively few men have voluntarily, and at their own expense, undertaken to study not only the conditions that make for better and cheaper travel, more profitable commercial intercourse and greater productiveness, but for a more wholesome and a higher spiritual existence. And again it is so with the hope that the great self-governing community will out of its desire and treasury bring about these conditions.
These few men and women, possessed both by a love of that still uncouth city and an ideal objectively learned in the days when the "White City" stood between it and the lakes, have already spent a half-million francs in study and in making plans—in addition to all the months and years of volunteer, unpaid service.
The principal items of this great scheme are:
1. The improvement of the lake front.
2. The creation of a system of highways outside the city.
3. The improvement of railway terminals and the development of a complete traction system for both freight and passengers.