With our traveller of 1840, we visited Chicago and found her a flourishing and rapidly increasing town of nearly five thousand inhabitants. Even then she was recognized as a centre for the region immediately surrounding her. The radius of her influence has extended in a way that would have seemed at that time inconceivable. Her population has run up to over two millions, and in wealth as well she has come to be the second great financial centre of the United States, ranking in this as in population next to New York. She began her city life in 1837 with $1993 in her treasury. To get money for sanitary drainage, for paving a few streets, and purchasing two fire engines the finance committee of the common council applied to the State Bank of Illinois for a loan of twenty-five thousand dollars, to be paid back within five years,--a request which the State Bank politely but curtly declined to grant. To-day her bank clearances amount to some seven thousand million dollars. And so we might go on with striking and astonishing contrasts. We have come to take large statements and superlative adjectives for granted about Chicago’s size, wealth, and commerce. Do we realize that she is the leading lake city in the other lines of which we have spoken? The public school system of Chicago with its million of children has been and is being developed along the best modern pedagogical principles by men and women who are recognized leaders in the educational world. As a centre for higher education the city takes high rank. Besides its technical schools, like the Armour Institute, it has two great universities, Chicago and Northwestern. The former began its career when John D. Rockefeller decided to take the name and property of the old denominational university of that name, sold at auction under foreclosure, and to found a great institution. To this end he set apart a large sum of money and secured as president Dr. William R. Harper of Yale. With the remarkable growth of the university since it opened in 1892 with seven hundred and two students, we are all familiar. In music and art Chicago is preëminent, both for its high grade of achievement and for the widespread diffusion of its culture among its citizens. In 1905 Orchestra Hall was dedicated as a home for music, and this building, one of the finest in the world, had been built by a popular subscription, to which thousands of the middle and poorer classes contributed their dollars. The Chicago Art Institute has an attendance yearly of over half a million visitors, a number exceeding that of any art museum in America, and its library is consulted annually by fifty thousand people. Such a record is remarkable, and such enthusiasm has produced and is producing recognized artists. In architectural excellence the story is the same. In philanthropy and social settlement work Hull House, under the leadership of Jane Addams, is only the most conspicuous of many powerful agencies for good.