THE TRIUMPH OF JUSTICE
BY CLARENCE S. DARROW.
It was in 1850 that William Henry came to Chicago. He was then a young man of twenty-five and fresh from his father’s farm. While William was still in his teens it was plain that the slow life of New England would never satisfy his ambitions and desires and so his restless nature turned him to the great, wide West.
William had scarcely landed in the little, muddy, struggling town before he knew that he and the city would grow up together. Even in its early days, Chicago had that wonderful power which clings to it still—that power of inspiring every one who touches it with absolute confidence in its greatness and its strength.
When William Henry came to Chicago it was a little village stuck fast in the swamp and mud that bordered the great lake, while in every other direction stretched the endless prairie with its black soil and its green, waving grass. But William Henry was young and Chicago was young and even then in his imagination he saw before him the endless stone streets and the unnumbered stores and factories and homes that the future years would bring.
He had not long been in Chicago before he caught the spirit of its vigor and they both marched rapidly toward wealth and power. He soon founded a tobacco warehouse and salesroom on Lake Street, and his business steadily increased with the growth of the city until he gained that imposing title of dignity, influence, selfishness and narrowness, “a business man.” As he left the busy years behind, his warehouse grew greater, and he moved from place to place until he occupied a whole building on Lake Street which he had bought and paid for from the incense that a generous people was everlastingly sending up, if not to his glory, still to his profit.
William Henry had come from the farm, and with all his city life and training he kept the inborn love for the soil, for the blue sky, the open air and a piece of land big enough for a cottage, a garden, a barn and a chicken house—such necessities as he had known in his younger days. These simple surroundings of a rural life which seem hard and bare while they are living things, because of the toil and pains that all the necessities of life impose—these simple companions of our youth seem, somehow, to grow into the fiber of our being, and when we look back upon them from our artificial surroundings and our worn out feelings, the mist of the gathering years covers them with a glamor that makes us think that our childhood was lived in a fairyland.
So when business grew prosperous, Henry looked for a piece of land. He did not want a twenty-five foot lot or even an acre, but he wanted a fine, big “patch” on which he “could turn around.” He always kept a horse and buggy, and every Sunday after his week’s work was done, he would drive out into the country to find a “patch.” He drove out beyond the brick stores; out beyond the houses and frame cottages; out beyond the utmost limit of the place; out on the open prairie, covered with water in the spring and rank with high weeds and waving grass in the summer months, and out there in the country he found a “patch” of fifty acres of raw prairie, which, like a herd of wild horses on the plains, had never been subdued by man. His friends and neighbors laughed when he told them of his “farm” clear out beyond the confines of civilization, almost to the red man’s reservation, but he told them to wait and see. In his prophetic brain there rose the scene of a great city, stretching out along the lake, reaching far to the north and south and west—a wondrous conglomeration of all the people of the earth drawn together by the magic name “Chicago.”
In his vision, he could see railroads and street cars, stone pavements and brick houses covering the “patch” with teeming life. Poor Henry, he was not a fool; he was too wise. For there are two men for whom the world never has any use; one is the fool and the other the philosopher. The fool believes that there is nothing but today; the wise man thinks that there is nothing but tomorrow. So the fool toils and the wise man dreams, and the mediocre man reaps the harvest—reaps the harvest born of the poor man’s work and the wise man’s dreams.
When William Henry bought this patch, he had a vision of a time when relieved from business cares, he would build a house like the one his father owned, only on a larger scale. He would have a garden, such as it seemed to him was planted behind his father’s house. He would have a barn with horses, and cows that gave real milk, and a chicken house where real eggs were laid, and then, still further on in the magical future that he knew was in store for the city that he loved, he saw his “patch” cut up into building lots and covered with stores and factories and houses built of brick and stone and standing firm and brave to verify his faith and dreams.