I watched Mr. Ford with curious interest. Instead of showing any impatience or disgust at the show of temper and the loud disorder, he sat through the long session deeply, intently absorbed. Every question for debate, and every phase of discussion, and all the progress of the business, and the varying claims of the many organizations, and the widely differing personalities of the members, each won his vital interest, and, with amazing discrimination, he seemed to follow them with intelligent understanding. And when there came a report of progress in a strike among certain workers in shoe factories, and a statement of the causes of the strike and the measures which were being taken to carry it to a successful issue, I could see that he was more than ever roused. “That’s the most interesting meeting I ever was to,” he said to me, as we walked down the street together. “I ain’t never realized before how mixed up things can be when there’s so many working people, and the men that hire them are mostly all organized in big companies. Why, the working people ain’t got nothing else they can do but organize too, to get their just rights. They have a pretty hot time in their meetings, if that’s a sample, but I guess they’ll know what they’re about. I guess I’ll join.” * * * * * In a very few days I must leave Chicago. I own to a longing to go and launch out upon the great farming regions between the Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, which I hope to cover in my journey before the autumn is far spent. I have been watching the coming of the spring in the Exposition grounds and in the charming parks of the city and along its beautiful boulevards, and I feel its subtle drawings to the country, to a life once more of labor in the fields. But I am very far from being prepared to go. Some little of a phase of life which in all large centres of population accompanies the swift industrial changes of the present I have seen here in Chicago, where it differs but slightly from similar conditions in every congested labor market. And under the play of the modern gregarious instinct there surely are few centralized markets which are not congested. But of the real city as a great positive force and a world-wide commercial power, whose unfaltering energies have built a huge metropolis in a generation, and are fast crowning their labors with splendid achievements in education and in art, I have been able to see little, and I have given no impression whatever. This much I have seen on the grounds where I am now a workman: I have watched something of the slow emerging from a scene of utter chaos of a co-ordinated scheme of landscape-gardening and of architecture, which has long passed the experimental stage, and is unfolding to the world, by a miracle of creative and constructive genius, a real vision of beauty and power and grace, which certainly holds for the living generation of civilized men a promise of rich blessings. CHAPTER VII