in the street except in a fire-proof vessel. [Footnote: S. E. Sparling, "Municipal History and Present Organization of the City of Chicago," University of Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 23, 1898.] The aboriginal frog croaked on the very site of the place where grand opera is now sung. The city's development was largely left to the haphazard, unrestrained, but whole-souled, big-hearted, self-confident individualism, such as has been potent in Pittsburgh. The restrictions were mainly those of the prohibitory Mosaic commandments. And so this city, increasing its population by a half-million in each of the last three decades, has come to stand next to Paris in population and first of all great American cities in the constructive activity of its civic consciousness and urban imagination. The city is still smoke-enwrapped (when the wind does not blow from the lake); its streets run out into prairie dust and mud; its harbor, of which Joliet spoke in praise, merits rather the disparagement of La Salle; there are offending smells and sights everywhere. But in the midst of it all and over it all is moving now, as a healing efficacy in troubled waters, a spirit of democratic aspiration. What Louis XIV or Napoleon I or Napoleon III, king and emperors, planned and did, compelling the co-operation of a people in making the city of Paris more beautiful, more habitable, that a people of millions out upon the prairies of Illinois are beginning to do out of their own desire and common treasury. It is of interest that the sovereign of France who gave her empire of those great stretches of plain, gave to Paris "those vast reaches of avenue and boulevard which to-day are the crowning features of the most beautiful of cities." But it must quicken France's interest further to know that this first systematic planning for a city, as an organic whole, by Louis XIV and Colbert, Le Notre and Blondel is now being followed out on that plain by a self-governing people, who have been making cities for barely half a century, to bring order and form and beauty, and better condition of living out of that grimy collection of homes and shops and beginnings of civic enterprise and great private philanthropies. A great deal has been already accomplished, such as the widening of the leading avenue, the addition of acres upon acres to the park space on the lake shore, the establishment of an efficient small park system; but it is only the beginning of a scheme that thinks of Chicago as a city that will some day hold ten millions of people. The prophecy of one statistician (now of New York) predicts for Chicago a population of thirteen million two hundred and fifty thousand souls in 1952; [Footnote: Bion J. Arnold, "Report of the Engineering and Operating Features of the Chicago Transportation Problem," pp. 95, 96.] and the great railroad builder, James J. Hill, has estimated that "when the Pacific coast shall have a population of twenty millions, Chicago will be the largest city in the