esistless volition,
became one of continuous compound progression.

LAND FOR ALMOST NOTHING.

Long before the business of the firm of Marshall Field & Co. had
reached the annual total of $50,000,000, Field, Leiter and their
associates had begun buying land in Chicago. Little capital was
needed for the purpose: The material growth of Chicago explains
sufficiently how a few dollars put in land fifty or sixty years ago
became in time an automatically-increasing fund of millions. A century
or so ago the log cabin of John Kinzie was the only habitation on a
site now occupied by a swarming, conglomerate, rushing population of
1,700,000.[172] Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a
huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the
habitat of nearly two millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of
excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the
many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury. A
saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires
than it did voters in 1840.

Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap; few settlers there were,
and the future could not be foreseen. In 1830 one-quarter of an acre
could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency
whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a title
forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive ownership and a perpetual
hold upon all succeeding generations. The more population grew, the
greater the value their labor gave the land; and the keener their need,
the more difficult it became for them to get land.

Within ten years--by about the beginning of the year 1840--the price of
a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500. A
decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000.
Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads
converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing
houses:--a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up
in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their
families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The
greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of
land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.

By 1870 the price of a quarter of an acre in the heart of the city
bounded to $120,000, and by 1880, to $130,000.

IT BECOMES WORTH MILLIONS.

During the next de