n so many white
people together, and never such a collection of miserables. There was no
colour in the street and no beauty--only a maze of wire-ropes overhead
and dirty stone flagging underfoot. 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, black as ink, and
filled with untold abominations, and bade 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 into 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 to 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 money, employ or buy of _me_ and me only!" Have you ever seen a
crowd at our famine relief distributions? You know then how 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 readers in language fitted to their comprehension that the
snarling together of telegraph wires, the heaving up of houses, and the
making of money is progress.

I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through scores of
miles of these terrible streets, and jostling some few hundred thousand
of these terrible people who talked money through their noses. The
cabman left me: but after a while I pick