334 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MOXTHLY. 



not only, but of any known human power ; a matter regulated by the 

 unwritten laws of trade, laws not only unwritten but, except in their 

 operation, entirely unknown ; a result and not a process. Let Senator 

 Cullom, for example, try and establish a trade-center, and he will 

 speedily recognize the impossibility of it. And did Senator Cullom 

 try, it would not be the first attempt. There are plenty of platted 

 cities and towns to-day in the United States which have been laid out 

 to make grass grow in the streets of actual cities in whose favor Na- 

 ture and geography long ago decreed that they should be, in deed and 

 in truth, trade-centers ; and the platters, their successors and assigns, 

 yet feel the hiatus made in their bank-accounts by payment for the 

 costly honor of making valuable suggestions to the attraction of gravi- 

 tation. 



I need not, I suppose, refer, for example, to the plethora of " cities " 

 and "city sites," whose prospects the vast dockage and trade territory 

 of Chicago has superseded. But the force, the unwritten law, that 

 has twice built the city of Chicago within the memory of men just en- 

 tering middle age, was not devised by human brains. Perhaps a better 

 answer to Senator Cullom's remarkable proposition about " trade-cen- 

 ters " could not be devised than a brief tracing of the operations of 

 this law in this very building and rebuilding of a geographical trade- 

 center of this continent. And if it shall be said "even if human 

 laws did not build Chicago, a lack of exact knowledge of this opera- 

 tion and an interstate jealousy of their inevitable result contributed to 

 the building," yet that ignorance and jealousy, it may be replied, 

 were a part of the result of the working of the law, rather than of the 

 process by which it worked. 



No human foresight placed Lake INIichigan where it is. But human 

 foresight did perceive that somewhere near its foot a great commercial 

 center must some day arise. Various points were selected by shrewd 

 pioneers ; and if the reader will take down his map he will find them 

 still indicated upon it — Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Waukegan, and 

 jMichigan City were perhaps the most promising of these (the latter 

 especiall}', since here was the very foot of the great trunk or tongue 

 of navigable water which penetrated from the north into the rich cen- 

 tral ridge of the nation, along which its integral artery of inland com- 

 munication must run, and from whose head great navigable wings 

 were spreading east and west). Yet, while all these points were se- 

 lected, somehow the swamp where Chicago now lies was carefully 

 avoided. But it seems those natural causes which we call laws of 

 trade were in operation ; the heavy settlement of the Ohio Valley 

 sought its outlet on the lakes, and somehow the first practical expres- 

 sion of that search — a railroad — capped, not Milwaukee, Racine, or 

 Kenosha, but the swamp where rose Chicago. And now occurred a 

 Avonderful thing. The jealousy of those lake-ports, which the laws of 

 trade had passed aside in favor of Chicago, began to operate. Each 



