3d. Work enlarges our thoughts and hearts by holding us in intelligent relation with the general current of interest to which our own efforts are contributed. The care that every man has to take is lest he contract to the dimensions of the place he occupies while doing his work, or narrow to the size of the particular forms of work he happens to be turning out. The mason can reduce, and without care will be likely to, to the proportions of the brick he is laying, or the manufacturer to the dimensions of the shoe-peg he is making or driving. Men are made near-sighted by continously scrutinizing what lies close to them. Hardly can anything better be done for men and women of small employment than so to instruct them in the history, principles and wide contacts of their occupation as to show to them the far reach and multiplied relations of that occupation. It is far less the size of the workman's work than it is the felt relations in which that work stands to the general concern that determines whether the workman is to be enlarged or belittled by it. It ought to be recognized by every employer, as his conscientious duty, to see to it that his employés do not dull and deaden into machines in the performance of the tasks that they are paid for doing. A mother may do the commonest kind of things in her home, or teach the letters of the alphabet in tiring reiteration to her little fidgety, frolicking four-year-old; but if it is done with the expectation that he will grow up into man's estate by and by, and that then, by virtue of the intelligence and character that she is just now nurturing, he will possibly be in position to mold the opinions and shape the destiny of the generation in which he will stand, then her thoughts will no longer reduce themselves to the size of the little, dirty, dog-eared primer out of which she instructs him, but be as wide and strong as the beneficent power that the boy, when he becomes a man, will be in condition to exercise. The fly on the window-pane gains vastly in size if we will give it distance, and think of it instead as creeping athwart the sky. There is no brook so small but what, if you will follow it closely down in all its meanderings, it will at last conduct you to the sea. If a man is mixed in some large enterprise like Moses and David, Solomon and Cyrus, then this sense of the broad reach of our work is easy. It is much easier for great men to become greater than it is for average men to keep from becoming smaller. But conspicuous men, and deeds that are evidently world-deeds, are infrequent, which must be part of the reason why Scripture is continually putting small acts to the front, to remind us that even such are large enough to come into a volume of divine revelation, and have a world-reference when surveyed by divine eyes. There is a great uplift in feeling that though we do but little, that little is a necessary part of the whole. It serves us as the small wire serves the telegrapher, which, though small, and lying down in the silence and the dark, is large and nimble enough to let his thought slip along it and across to towns and continents the farther side of the sea. I would have the child taught that every footfall of his changes a little the position of the globe, because that is one of those parables of God outside of Holy Writ from which a larger lesson can be drawn and the child encouraged to feel that he may every day do something that will be a benefit to the one next him, and that in this way his little deed, like his little footfall, will run out and extend till it has at last touched everybody everywhere. There is much that is broadening and quickening in this. We really determine how large our horizon shall be, and lengthen or shorten the diameter of our world at our own individual option. Our largest deed is but small, yet pregnant with large discipline for mind and heart when held steadily in relation with what is present, past and to come, like the little eye-piece of the telescope, through which, nevertheless, we come into conference with the remote features of our own landscape, and even the distant and glowing magnitudes of the sky. And the best of it all is, that this broadened regard not only expands us beyond the confines of our daily routine work, and effects in us new vigor of thought, but draws us away from ourselves, helps to emancipate us from the thraldrom of our own particular interest, draws us into near identity with society and the world at large, and so makes the world's cause our cause and its interests our own interests. So far as the press is clean and truthful, bringing before us day by day, as it does, the photograph of scenes that have in the twenty-four hours transpired all along the rim of the world, I would distinctly and gratefully recognize the press as so much chosen enginery of evangelization. It gets us under the burden of other men's burdens. It draws us out in long regards and remote affections, and with stronger enticement than we know allures us into magnificent sympathies, that are computable only in terms of the earth's axis and equator. Here lies a good half of all the value there is in the conferments of thought and prayer and money that we make to the less favored portions of the earth. This is why young people are being taught to contribute of their time and effects to the poor, needy and untutored, whether at home or abroad. It is not the tension of their thoughts simply, nor the money value of their contributions, so much as it is that in their own act and work they pass beneath the splendid discipline of the great world-interests and needs of the times. It gives the necessities and events of the world opportunity to work back upon them in priestly tuition. We are made stalwart by every world-burden that lets its own weight down upon us, and enriched by every world-distress that through the medium of our act we come into any kind of conference and communion with. So let us turn our eyes out instead of in. Though we have to do little things repetitiously in a small place, let us do them in the strength of the inspiration that flows back upon us from that whole world of which this small place of ours forms a necessary part--something as the Lord had the heart to die on Golgotha, in that in dying there he knew he was dying for the world at large; as the apostles were stimulated to preach in Jerusalem by the contact in which by the terms of the Lord's command their labors there were held with the evangelization of the earth's remotest bounds, and as we are stimulated and empowered to pray for the smaller and closer necessities of daily life by having been taught first of all to pray, " Thy kingdom come." C.H. Parkhurst ANCIENT CHICAGO * And not yet fifty years old! The title of our paper must seem jocose to a foreigner. It is very well for Layard or Rawlinson to write of Ancient Nineveh, or for some Old Mortality to work up the Roman Chester of England, or London Town or Santa Fé or Boston Town. The relics and skeletons, dust, cobwebs and broken slumbers make very entertaining reading, with no violence to our respect for chronology, or denial of our notions about antiquity. We rise up before the hoary head of those old human centers. But this Chicago is an affair of last week, with an antiquary, -the growth of some stray seed from Jonah's gourd. The persons are alive, and yet have business in them, who attended the meeting in 1833 for incorporating this town, and saw the city charter for Chicago granted in 1837 by the Illinois legislature. They can stand yet in the door-ways of their memories, if not of their original log-cabins, and correct the proofsheets of this chapter on Ancient Chicago. With a little free play, backward and forward, we propose to keep beyond those two dates of incorporation in this historical study.† When Marquette, in his Christian mission, lay ill in his cabin, at the Portage de Chicagau and mouth of the Calumet, in the winter of 1674-75, the fur traders came to his relief. They were usually in advance of the explorer and the priest, and they early opened what in railroad parlance is now called the "Chicagou route" between Canada and Louisiana. It was in 1718 when Governor Keith of Pennsylvania sent out James Logan to explore for routes westward to the Mississippi, and of one line he reports thus: "From Lake Huron they pass by the Strait of Michilimakina four leagues, being two in breadth, and of a great depth, to the Lake Illinoise; thence one hundred and fifty leagues to Fort Miamis, situated at the mouth of the River Chicagou. This port is not regularly garrisoned." Of the history of this fort there are no extant records yet found, and at the council for the treaty of Greenville, 1795, no Indian could give information concerning its origin. Since this article was written, the first volume of a valuable History of Chicago, to be published in three volumes, has come to hand. With its aid this article has been revised, and credit has been given in the cases of new information. The work of Mr. Andreas is eminently elaborate, and must have cost much patient, painful and expensive research. Andreas, I.: 79. * COPYRIGHT, 1885, BY W. BARROWS In 1773, one William Murray, an Englishman, residing at Kaskaskia, then so eminent, held a Council there with the chiefs of the Illinois tribe, and purchased of them two immense tracts of land. One of these tracts embraced the most of the grand delta between the Illinois and the Mississippi, with a very large area farther north, and had substantially these boundaries-quite generous, considering the price-from the mouth of the Illinois and up it "to Chicagou or Garlick Creek," about 275 miles; thence northerly "to a great mountain to the northward of the White Buffalo plain," about 280 miles; and thence direct to the place of beginning about 150 miles. The outline of the other tract is not at hand. For the two tracts Murray says that the purchase was made "to the entire satisfaction of the Indians, in consideration of the sum of five shillings to them in hand paid," together with some goods and merchandise. Before the contract was consummated, other Englishmen united with him under the title of "The Illinois Land Company." The whole affair carries a very modern air, specially with that addition of “other Englishmen," and illustrates some of the broader processes of to-day in civilizing and Americanizing the Indians. But five years later General George Rogers Clark put that magnificent quadrant between the Ohio and the Mississippi under the American flag, and so swept the acres and Indians of Murray, with his English associates, into the young Union. In 1781, the Company pressed their claims for ratification by Congress, and the Senate entered this opinion in the words of the Committee, which became a precedent: “In the opinion of the Committee, deeds obtained by private persons from the Indians, without any antecedent authority or subsequent information from the Government, could not vest, in the grantees mentioned in such deed, a title to the lands therein described." These primitive "Indian Contractors" worked their "ring" around Congress till 1797, and then abandoned their project for civilizing the North American Indian. But they made another point in history for Ancient Chicago. * The earliest trace of any occupant at Chicago is that of Guarie, a Frenchman, the corn-hills of whose cabin patch were traceable in 1818, though overgrown with grass. He located there prior to 1778, and had his hut on the river bank, near where Fulton Street now meets it. † This was the year in which General Clark, under the sovereign instruction of Virginia, and with a commission signed by Patrick Henry, Governor, conquered from the English the region between the Ohio, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. In October of that year Virginia erected the * Andreas. I.: 69, 70. The Discovery and Conquest of the Northwest. By Rufus Blanchard. |