It is everything in getting a point of view. Last summer a lady of New Orleans who had never before been out of her native French city, and who would look upon the whole North with the impartial eyes of a foreigner—and more than that, with Continental eyes—visited Chicago, and afterwards New York. “Which city did you like best?” I asked, without taking myself seriously in the question. To my surprise, she hesitated. This hesitation was fatal to all my preconceived notions. It mattered not thereafter which she preferred: she had hesitated. She was actually comparing Chicago to New York in her mind, as one might compare Paris and London. The audacity of the comparison I saw was excused by its innocence. I confess that it had never occurred to me to think of Chicago in that Continental light. “Well,” she said, not seeing at all the humor of my remark, “Chicago seems to me to have finer buildings and residences, to be the more beautiful city; but of course there is more in New York; it is a greater city; and I should prefer to live there for what I want.” This naïve observation set me thinking, and I wondered if there was a point of view, say that of divine omniscience and fairness, in which Chicago would appear as one of the great cities of the world, in fact a metropolis, by-and-by to rival in population and wealth any city of the seaboard. It has certainly better commercial advantages, so far as water communication and railways go, than Paris or Pekin or Berlin, and a territory to supply and receive from infinitely vaster, richer, and more promising than either. This territory will have many big cities, but in the nature of things only one of surpassing importance. And taking into account its geographical position—a thousand miles from the Atlantic seaboard on the one side, and from the mountains on the other, with the acknowledged tendency of people and of money to it as a continental centre—it seems to me that Chicago is to be that one.