The first railroad at that time was the Galena and Chicago Union, which was chartered January 16, 1836. Galena at that time was believed to be destined far to outrival her neighbor, and therefore demanded and secured the place of honor in the title of the road. To-day thirty-nine distinct railroads enter Chicago, more than half the railway systems of America make that city their objective point, and the aggregate distance travelled by freight and passenger trains daily entering the metropolis is over 80,000 miles. In the thunder of this traffic the clamor of rivalry long since died away. The British critic, Mr. Archer, remarked that he was unable to detect the slightest evidence of competition with Chicago even in a "Pisgah view from the top of the Auditorium." The employment of large adjectives in the recital of the city's history is not without warrant. "The trouble with you people in Chicago," remarked a visitor, "is that you exaggerate too much." "We have to," retorted a citizen, proudly, "in fact we have to lie to tell the truth." Even when we speak of the fire of 1871, we must call it the "great Chicago fire," for never before perhaps in the history of the world were so many of the piled-up monuments of man's hands consumed so rapidly. Such awful moments, happily, seldom come in the history of communities. It was as if the fires of Dante's Inferno had been permitted for a night and day to devastate a great city of this planet. One thousand four hundred and seventy acres of buildings were utterly consumed. The entire business portion of the city vanished in smoke and flame. One hundred thousand persons were left homeless and in many cases penniless. Seventeen thousand four hundred and fifty buildings were destroyed, the total valuation of the loss by fire being $186,000,000. In the presence of a catastrophe, so vast that the imagination reeled as the eye wandered over the mighty paths where the cyclones of fire had swept, social inequalities and race prejudices were ignored. All right-minded men stood together in a common bond of fellowship. Doubtless much of the present spirit of amalgamation of the people of the city is an outgrowth of the calamity which thirty years ago brought the representatives of those divers races elbow to elbow in the common cause of rebuilding their homes and reconstructing their lines of industry. The riots at the Haymarket did not indicate bad blood between the races of the city, but merely an incidental if not accidental social unrest not uncommon in all our greater cities. [Illustration RUINS OF THE GREAT FIRE, CHICAGO.]