"Not bad 'eats,'" said he with a twinkle. "I'll remember that. In Chicago I ate dog."
One can hardly see Chicago in two or three days. It is a more important place for studying America than is New York. For it is more characteristic. The lights of the capitals of Europe all shine in New York. It is a city of a hundred good-bys. But in Chicago one light burns and that is the light of America. It is a city of a hundred good mornings.
But Chicago so much depends on your knowing what it was. The visitor who sees it for the first time is still likely to pass an adverse judgment upon it—especially if he wanders in its streets at random. There is dirt and a humanity that looks like dirt, there is appalling carelessness and lack of joy in life, rust and refuse uncounted—but that is not all. Chicago is a city rising to strong self-consciousness, a city getting under control and improving steadily. It is no longer the city which Stead saw when he wrote, If Christ came to Chicago, nor is it the city described in Upton Sinclair's Jungle. It is many streets better. It has gone several blocks West. In Chicago people now talk of the "City Beautiful."
Chicago has been the anvil of fortune, and that merely, the smithy, the works, the place to which men went to make money, to lift themselves from a life of rough primitive toil to a life of clean clothes and ease. There they employed whom they could to help them, and incidentally helped their helpers often. It is true they exploited the foreign immigrant and that they did not help him much—because he was largely helpless. And they attracted great numbers of Negroes and exploited them and did not help them much. They left the immigrant and the colored man to live round about their factories amid waste ends of material. And when that labor itself wore out, it lay around also as waste-ends—waste-ends of humanity. Hence the vast aggregation of dirt and poverty in the city.
But the point of view has changed. The people of business are so rich that America has become intolerant of poverty. Like the Prince of Monaco, she is determined to abolish the poor. She will not admit new poor into her country, and those she has she is raising out of the slough. Every thing and every one is being cleaned up. Chicago is to become all middle class, and during the ten years since I saw it first it has made enormous strides in that direction.
Michigan Avenue and the Magnolia Walk, the long parklike water-front, were very gratifying to our eyes after the clamor and bang of State Street and Dearborn, where there are still many at the anvil of fortune. "In a hundred years," I hazarded, "the whole city may have become a park."
Kansas City, at which we stopped next, is of course far less problematical in aspect than Chicago. It is smaller. It grew up in a more prosperous era. It took advantage of all the new fixtures and technical appliances of a later stage. It is, therefore, cleaner and not so much littered with discarded material. The stock yards and tanning factories, however, charge the air heavily upon occasion with an odor which should surely be intolerable. No one could live for pleasure in a city of infected air. It must, therefore, be a city of business, money-making, and that only, for most people. Yet it is a fine city on the high bank of the Kansas River, overlooking rich farmland. It is the fringe of the West, and cowboys with their broad hats and sunburnt faces are not infrequent on its crowded streets. There is an air of expectancy, as if the gates of industrialism and bondage stood open and the American nation was free to pour out on to the prairies and the wild places of the Rockies.
It much astonished Ewart that whilst passing through the States of Kansas and Iowa we could not buy cigarettes. There no one smoked, and it appeared no one wanted to. Cigarette smoking was regarded as a vice and a shame.
"Betting has also been abolished, and so has immorality," observed a Kansan with a smile.
"Free speech also," said I. And I had him there, for America was then still excited by the arrest of William Allen White at Emporia, Kansas, for saying he was partly in favor of a railroad strike.