It has a campus of 45 acres on the Lake Michigan
shore. The University includes a college of Liberal Arts, and schools of
medicine, law, pharmacy, dentistry, music, and theology. Many of the
departments are coeducational.
[Illustration PUBLIC LIBRARY, CHICAGO.]
The public schools of Chicago are crowded with three quarters of a million
children of parents for few of whom "Plato and the swing of Pleiades and
the tall reaches of the peaks of song" had a meaning. And these children of
every kindred and tongue are not herded into classes and indifferently
taught. Modern science assists them from the start with anthropometric
examinations, and scientific methods are in use in every school. There
could be no more hopeful "sign and portent" of the city's future than is
furnished by its public schools.
Voluntarily, by popular vote of the people, civil service was established
in all branches of the city administration, and the principle laid down
that industrious merit rather than political influence should fill the
thousands of positions in the school department and city branches in
general, a graphic illustration that the spoils system is not a Chicago
ideal. Benevolent institutions thrive under the munificent endowment of its
men of wealth. Seers like Professor David Swing have preached the Gospel to
an eager people, thousands on Sunday being turned away, unable to press to
the pews through the multitude of churchgoers. All these phenomena present
the interesting psychological truth that with Chicago's liberty and
cosmopolitan make-up has been developed a reassuring force "making for
righteousness." The city is not yet prepared for canonization, but in many
ways it is, in its largeness of life and tolerance, an example to the
cities of the world. She is still apt, perhaps, in speaking, for example,
of her art galleries to dwell overmuch upon the cost of the buildings and
paintings and the number of acres.
The unprejudiced critic or historian knows that not all Chicago is pork and
pig-iron, though why these industries are not as honorable as poetry and
prose, perhaps they who sit in the seat of the scornful will explain.
Booker T. Washington well says that a people cannot be truly great until
they recognize that it is as dignified to till the soil as it is to pen an
epic, and in the same line of thought it might be said that a people who
"live laborious days" packing meat and handling lumber, particularly by the
thousand carloads, are not necessarily belated travellers on the highway
that leads to national integrity and renown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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