wealth and poverty, the many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury. A saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires than it did voters in 1840.
Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap; few settlers there were, and the future could not be foreseen. In 1830 one-quarter of an acre could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a title forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive ownership and a perpetual hold upon all succeeding generations. The more population grew, the greater the value their labor gave the land; and the keener their need, the more difficult it became for them to get land.
Within ten years—by about the beginning of the year 1840—the price of a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500. A decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000. Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing houses:—a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.
By 1870 the price of a quarter of an acre in the heart of the city bounded to $120,000, and by 1880, to $130,000.
IT BECOMES WORTH MILLIONS.
During the next decade—a decade full of bitter distress to the working population of the United States, and marked by widespread suffering—the price shot up to $900,000. By 1894—a panic year, in which millions of men were out of work and in a state of appalling destitution—a