The city is still smoke-enwrapped (when the wind does not
blow from the lake); its streets run out into prairie dust and mud; its
harbor, of which Joliet spoke in praise, merits rather the disparagement
of La Salle; there are offending smells and sights everywhere. But in the
midst of it all and over it all is moving now, as a healing efficacy in
troubled waters, a spirit of democratic aspiration. What Louis XIV or
Napoleon I or Napoleon III, king and emperors, planned and did, compelling
the co-operation of a people in making the city of Paris more beautiful,
more habitable, that a people of millions out upon the prairies of
Illinois are beginning to do out of their own desire and common treasury.
It is of interest that the sovereign of France who gave her empire of
those great stretches of plain, gave to Paris "those vast reaches of
avenue and boulevard which to-day are the crowning features of the most
beautiful of cities." But it must quicken France's interest further to
know that this first systematic planning for a city, as an organic whole,
by Louis XIV and Colbert, Le Notre and Blondel is now being followed out
on that plain by a self-governing people, who have been making cities for
barely half a century, to bring order and form and beauty, and better
condition of living out of that grimy collection of homes and shops and
beginnings of civic enterprise and great private philanthropies.
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