creative imagination on the shore of Lake Michigan to carry through any
municipal enterprise, however vast, to a generous and final conclusion.
The conception of those boulevards discloses a tremendous audacity and
faith. And as you roll along the macadam, threading at intervals a
wide-stretching park, you are overwhelmed--at least I was--by the
completeness of the scheme's execution and the lavishness with which the
system is in every detail maintained and kept up.

[Illustration: A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE--CHICAGO]

You stop to inspect a conservatory, and find yourself in a really
marvelous landscape garden, set with statues, all under glass and
heated, where the gaffers of Chicago are collected together to discuss
interminably the exciting politics of a city anxious about its soul. And
while listening to them with one ear, with the other you may catch
the laconic tale of a park official's perilous and successful vendetta
against the forces of graft.

And then you resume the circuit and accomplish many more smooth,
curving, tree-lined miles, varied by a jolting section, or by the faint
odor of the Stock-yards, or by a halt to allow the longest freight-train
in the world to cross your path. You have sighted in the distance
universities, institutions, even factories; you have passed through many
inhabited portions of the endless boulevard, but you have not actually
touched hands with the city since you left it at the beginning of the
ride. Then at last, as darkness falls, you feel that you are coming to
the city again, but from another point of the compass. You have rounded
the circle of its millions. You need only think of the unkempt, shabby,
and tangled outskirts of New York, or of any other capital city, to
realize the miracle that Chicago has put among her assets ...