Vol. XXXV, No. 1 



WASHINGTON 



January, 1919 



TEE 



ATDONAL 



CHICAGO TODAY AND TOMORROW 



A City Whose Industries Have Changed the Food Status 



of the World and Transformed the Economic 



Situation of a Billion People 



By William Joseph Showalter 



Author of "New York — The Metropolis oe Mankind," etc. 



WHEN La Salle, the intrepid 

 French explorer, standing on 

 the shore of Lake Michigan, 

 surveyed, with the prophetic eye of the 

 geographer, the site of what is now Chi- 

 cago, the fourth city of the world, he is 

 reputed to have exclaimed : "This will be 

 the gate of empire, this the seat of com- 

 merce." 



So definitely do the forces of geogra- 

 phy give direction to the currents of his- 

 tory that this explorer, surrounded by 

 what must have been an unprepossessing 

 site, a vast region as yet peopled only by 

 Indians and bison and wolves, was able 

 to look forward through the years and 

 to see arising a teeming metropolis, the 

 center of an empire whose richness beg- 

 gars description, whose influence upon 

 civilization challenges estimate, and 

 whose future promises achievements that 

 no careful writer would attempt to de- 

 tail, lest today he seem an enthusiast and 

 tomorrow a short-sighted prophet. 



YOUNGEST OF THE WORLD'S CITIES OE 

 MIEUONS 



Other cities there are that outrank Chi- 

 cago in size — London, New York, and 

 Paris are larger^but there is not today 



on the face of the globe a single metrop- 

 olis with as many as a million inhabitants 

 that is as young as Chicago, with her two 

 and a half millions. 



The Portuguese court was living in 

 Rio de Janeiro before Chicago was more 

 than a lakeside village of fifteen ram- 

 shackle houses. Buenos Aires was the 

 seat of a bishopric before La Salle first 

 saw the shores of Lake Michigan. Tokyo 

 and Osaka, Canton and Peking, Calcutta 

 and Bombay, Moscow and Petrograd, 

 Vienna and Budapest, Berlin and Ham- 

 burg — all these were fair-sized cities 

 when the site of Chicago was still an 

 unpeopled marsh. 



Geography made Chicago. Its posi- 

 tion at the foot of the Great Lakes re- 

 sulted in its evolution as the farthest 

 inland terminus of navigation of the in- 

 land seas. All railroad lines of the early 

 history of the northern part of the great 

 Mississippi Valley converged on this one 

 point as unerringly and as necessarily as 

 caravans seek passes in crossing moun- 

 tain barriers. 



Made what it is by the processes of 

 geography, Chicago soon returned the 

 compliment by helping geography trans- 

 form other regions. Its slaughtering and 



