CHICAGO.

Te Aroha News, Volume VIII, Issue 485, 2 July 1890, Page 3

CHICAGO.

By T. C. Firth.

“ Don’t you think Chicago a grand city ?” asks a resident, proud of hie city, “ with its millions of people, its lofty buildings, its noble parks.” “No.” I reply, “its parks and boulevards are the best part of it. One half or two-thirds of the crowds existing, or trying to exist in it, would have been better in tho country. As to the lofty buildings, ten to twelve storeys high, I think if Satan had desired to inflict a curse upon a community he could have hardly done it more effectually than by inspiring a fool, who thereupon erected tho first ten-storey building. The fashion having been set, tho men of the city made hasto to destroy themselves and their descendants by filling the city with modern towers of Babel. “ These hideous piles of brick render the city gloomy and dreary. They shut out the sunlight, and make of the daylight a mere dull grey medium. The effect upon city men is already apparent ; nobody laughs, rarely even smiles. The sombre influence of the city is eating into their souls. Their bodies feel it. A generation or two of children born under such leaden influences, if they live at all, will be like flowers which rarely see the sun—pale, puny, feeble. For, if you cannot raise a healthy plant or animal without sunshine, what sorb ot a croaturo will the man be who is born and grows up in tho grey, sombre atmosphere of such a sunless city as ten-storied Chicago ? “ If people want to build a ten-storied city, they ought to take care that every street on which these gloomy pilefi are built should be at least four chains wide. With streets 200 feet in width, the people who walk in the —streets or work in the electric-lib dungeons would have a chance of getting some sunlight into their souls and lives.

“ If Chicago ever bo again burnt down, I commend this suggestion to the rebuilders of the city. “These Americansare working themselves to death. They are destroying the healthy action of the delicate organisation of tho human body. Their nervous system is giving abundant evidence of overwork and premature decay. “To ibis ond the Pulmansloeperisnotthe least of tho influences at work. No man can travel much by night in a Pulman sleeper car without being the worse for it. Day and night these infatuated people rush madly on in their pursuit of what they term ‘ the almighty dollar.’ “ It was said of old ‘That the sins of tho parents shall be visited upon their children.’ Can Americans expect to break 60 many of the laws of health and life, and hope to escape the penalty ? “ With the frightful strain they are 60 recklessly, let me say so wickedly, putting on their nervous systems, what sorb of nerves do they expect their children to have '! They are wearing out their own vitality—can they hope to have children properly healthy either in mind or body ? “ Is one result not already beginning to be apparent in the fact that the United States has a larger proportion of idiots than any ether country in tho world, having 15‘5 idiots to every 10,000 living persons ; and though Americans say that many of these idiote are due to foreign immigrants, there can be very little doubt that it ia mainly due to outrageous and persistent violation of the laws of health and life by large sections of tho people.” “Well, stranger,” said some Americans who were sitting near me in the rotunda of the Grand Pacific Hotel, as I wrote, and to whom I read what I had written. “ Well, there is a great deal of truth in what you say.” In truth the poople of Chicago look upon their city with feelings akin to those of Nebuchadnezzar, when he said : “ Is not this Great Babylon which I have ' built ?”

We know what happened to him, and subsequently to tho great city he had built.

Looking at tho fate of most of the great cities of antiquity, the great cities of our own times may as well take warning. The ambition, pride and avarice, the want of consideration for the common people in tho old times, wore sins against God and man which worked the ruin of sinners.

What has been of old time lias come again in our times in an intenser form, and will be attended with similar results. In America and in some other countries, money is mote than man—money is the end, man the means; money the spoil, man the victim.

This is called progress. Yes, it is progress, if that can be progress which exalts the strong, which treads down the weak, which in tho hurly-burly race for riches, is rushing on with wild mad haste to the precipice not far ahead. Every great city, Chicago amongst the number, is a slumbering volcano which, one of these days, may buret into destructive action. Old Rome and its pagan civilisation fell before the wild barbarians who issued from primeval forests. The barbarians who threaten our civilisation, have been recklessly reared by ourselves in our great cities. “ Stuff !” says the millionaire of to-day or to-morrow, and stopping his ears, faster and faster he rushes in the raco for riches. He sees dollars, and dollars only, ahead ; ho knows not and cares not, that behind the dollars there lies his doom.