auty, in
flowing garments which would obstruct her progress and could never be
kept white. This is a mistake. Most masculine of cities, most American
of America's great centres, its shield should portray a strong youth in
the flush of adolescence, conscious power in his proud curled lip, fire
in his eye, springing to the foreground in the first ray of dawn, in his
right hand the sceptre of genius and his left grasping the key of
destiny. The good people of Chicago are not conspicuously lacking in
civic self-appreciation. They are accustomed to being twitted by rivals
in the rear on their boundless faith in their city's future greatness.
They can afford to listen smilingly. If the child is father of the man,
full-grown Chicago must some day tower above the up-stretched heads of
its envious seniors like a giant among, say, a committee of venerable
municipal Solons. Ordinary cities develop as babies do, slow growth to
maturity, but this extraordinary late-comer into the family attained
mental and muscular precocity in shorter time than its sisters required
to cut their wisdom-teeth. Considered in relation to its geographical
position and its express-speed rate of progress, Chicago has the
promise and potency of an imperial greatness no easier to exaggerate
than to limit. It was tried by fire in the day of small things, but
quickly rose to a new life and it still carries the memorial glow in its
heart as an inspiration to great things.

The word Chicago is a simpler form of the Indian name, Chacaqua, given
to the river in honor of their deity, the Thunderer. The position of
Chicago makes it the greatest lake port in the world. It is already the
second city in the United States, though only born in 1830, and has
hopes of becoming the first, by growth, and not by annexation policy.
True, the newest city inherits the wealth and experience which the older
ones had to gain for themselves, yet Chicago has done some fine original
things. It hitched up an inland sea as its beast of burden and made a
vast lake its pleasure pond. Finding itself only seven feet above the
level of Lake Michigan it lifted itself bodily another seven feet,
churches, warehouses, dwellings and all, with jack-screws, and shovelled
a new foundation of dry earth beneath. Fifteen years later the great
fire laid it lower than ever. On Oct. 8, 1871, began the disaster that
made nearly a hundred thousand people homeless, destroyed seventeen
thousand buildings and