Voluntarily, by popular vote of the people, civil service was established in all branches of the city administration, and the principle laid down that industrious merit rather than political influence should fill the thousands of positions in the school department and city branches in general, a graphic illustration that the spoils system is not a Chicago ideal. Benevolent institutions thrive under the munificent endowment of its men of wealth. Seers like Professor David Swing have preached the Gospel to an eager people, thousands on Sunday being turned away, unable to press to the pews through the multitude of churchgoers. All these phenomena present the interesting psychological truth that with Chicago's liberty and cosmopolitan make-up has been developed a reassuring force "making for righteousness." The city is not yet prepared for canonization, but in many ways it is, in its largeness of life and tolerance, an example to the cities of the world. She is still apt, perhaps, in speaking, for example, of her art galleries to dwell overmuch upon the cost of the buildings and paintings and the number of acres.
The unprejudiced critic or historian knows that not all Chicago is pork and pig-iron, though why these industries are not as honorable as poetry and prose, perhaps they who sit in the seat of the scornful will explain. Booker T. Washington well says that a people cannot be truly great until they recognize that it is as dignified to till the soil as it is to pen an epic, and in the same line of thought it might be said that a people who "live laborious days" packing meat and handling lumber, particularly by the thousand carloads, are not necessarily belated travellers on the highway that leads to national integrity and renown.
In wealth, in population, in the high character and eager attendance in her great schools, in libraries, art, and architecture, as evidenced by institutes, buildings, and academies of design, in her letters, as displayed by the literary output, in her spiritual conquests, as shown in the teachings of her poets and preachers, and even in the periodical reforms that purify the political atmosphere, Chicago's future will undoubtedly be, like her past, phenomenal.
MADISON
THE CITY OF THE FOUR LAKES
By REUBEN G. THWAITES
IN 1836, that portion of Michigan Territory which lay west of Lake Michigan, was erected into the Territory of Wisconsin. Within the borders of the nascent commonwealth there lived at that time about twelve thousand whites and nine thousand Indians. Many of the sites of future cities of Wisconsin were already occupied by agricultural settlers, isolated or in tiny groups.
Green Bay, a straggling French-Canadian settlement, had come down from the seventeenth century, maintaining a sickly existence upon the fur trade and the coasting traffic of the upper Great Lakes; Forts Winnebago (at Portage) and Crawford (at Prairie du Chien) were surrounded by meagre hamlets, chiefly of French creoles; the lead-mining region in the southwest, although sparsely settled, contained the bulk of the white population, with Mineral Point as its centre—a village having at the time an apparently brighter prospect than the new settlement at the mouth of Milwaukee River; there were also a few notches carved, at wide intervals, from the gloomy forest bordering the western shore of Lake Michigan. Outside of the settlements just enumerated, Wisconsin was practically uninhabited by whites. Here and there was to be found an Indian trader, the Yankee successor of the coureur de bois of the old French régime, or some exceptionally adventurous farmer; but their far-separated cabins only emphasized the density of the wilderness, through which roamed untrammelled the shiftless, gipsy-like aborigines,—the comparatively harmless Chippewas, Menomonies, Pottawatomies and Winnebagoes.