ooked down interminable vistas flanked with nine,
ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and crowded with men and women, and the
show impressed me with a great horror.

Except in London--and I have forgotten what London was like--I had
never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of
miserables. There was no color in the street and no beauty--only a maze
of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.

A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much
an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil
and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, that it was good to
huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other, and to dig
holes in the ground for offices.

He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures
hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they were trying
to make some money that they might not die through lack of food to put
into their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, and filled
with un-told abominations, and bid me watch the stream of traffic across
the bridges.

He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note that the
floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A Hottentot would not have
been guilty of this sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect pretty
enough, but the man who put them there had no thought of beauty, and,
therefore, he was a savage.

Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and studded
with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and looking down the
long street so adorned, it was as though each vender stood at his door
howling:--"For the sake of my money, employ or buy of me, and me only!"

Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know
then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their arms above the
crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women dolorously slap the
stomachs of their children and whimper. I had sooner watch famine relief
than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition. The
one I understand. The other makes me ill.

And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress, and
by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every intelligent
American should. The papers tell their clientele in language fitted to
their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the
heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progr