Less than
$40,000 was received for lands now worth much more than $100, 000,000.] no
public sanitary provision, no considerable public service of any sort. It
was a neighborly but unsocialized place, where the individual had little
restraint save of his own limitations and his personal love of his
neighbors. What social functions the city performed were self-protective
and not self-improving in motive. For example, fire might not be carried
in the street except in a fire-proof vessel. [Footnote: S. E. Sparling,
"Municipal History and Present Organization of the City of Chicago,"
University of Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 23, 1898.] The aboriginal frog
croaked on the very site of the place where grand opera is now sung.
The city's development was largely left to the haphazard, unrestrained,
but whole-souled, big-hearted, self-confident individualism, such as has
been potent in Pittsburgh. The restrictions were mainly those of the
prohibitory Mosaic commandments. And so this city, increasing its
population by a half-million in each of the last three decades, has come
to stand next to Paris in population and first of all great American
cities in the constructive activity of its civic consciousness and urban
imagination.
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