Chicago was not even thought of.
To-day, four hundred years after Columbus first saw American shores, one hundred and sixteen years after the United States were started in life by the Declaration of American Independence, these same struggling States of one hundred years ago are joined together to make the greatest and most prosperous nation in the world.

With a population of more than sixty-two millions of people; with the thirteen original States grown into forty-four, with the population of its three largest cities--New York; Philadelphia and Chicago--more than equal to the population of the whole country one hundred years ago; with schools and colleges and happy homes brightening the whole broad land that now stretches from ocean to ocean, the United States leads all other countries in the vast continent Columbus discovered.

Still westward, as Columbus led, the nation advances; and, in a great city that Columbus could never have imagined, and that the prophet of one hundred years ago scarcely dreamed of, the mighty Republic in 1892 invited all the rest of the world to join with it in celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the Discovery of America by Columbus the Admiral.

And to do this celebrating fittingly and grandly, it built up the splendid White City by the great Fresh Water Sea.
Columbus was a dreamer; he saw such wonderful visions of what was to be, that people, as we know, tapped their foreheads and called him "the crazy Genoese." But not even the wildest fancies nor the most wonderful dreams of Columbus came anywhere near to what he would really have seen if--he could have visited the Exposition at Chicago, in the great White City by the lake--a "show city" specially built for the World's Fair of 1893, given in his honor and as a monument to his memory.
Why, he would say, the Cathay that I spent my life trying to find was but a hovel alongside this! What would he have seen?
A city stretching a mile and a half in length, and more than half a mile in breadth; a space covering over five hundred acres of ground, and containing seventeen magnificent buildings, into any one of which could have been put the palaces of all the kings and queens of Europe known to Columbus's day.
And in these buildings he would have seen gathered together, all the marvelous and all the useful things, all the beautiful and all the delightful things that the world can make to-day, arranged and displayed for all the world to see.

He would have stood amazed in that wonderful city of glass and iron, that surpassingly beautiful city, all of purest white, that had been built some eight miles from the center of big and busy Chicago, looking out upon the blue waters of mighty Lake Michigan.
It was a city that I wish all the boys and girls of America--especially all who read this story of the man in whose honor it was built, might have visited.