One of the most interesting and intelligently conducted departments under the Commission has to do with the education of the people of Chicago with regard to the Plan. A great deal of money and energy has been expended in this work, with the result that city-wide misapprehension concerning the Plan has given place to city-wide comprehension. Lectures are given before schools and clubs with the idea of teaching Chicago what the plan is, why it is needed, and what great European cities have accomplished in similar directions. Books on the subject have been published and widely circulated, and one of these, "Wacker's Manual," has been adopted as a textbook by the Chicago Public Schools, with the idea of fitting the coming generations to carry on the work.
If the plan as it stands at present has been accomplished within a long lifetime, Chicago will have maintained her reputation for swift action. Two or three lifetimes would be time enough in any other city. However, Chicago desires the fulfillment of the prophecy she has on paper. Work is going on, and the extent to which it will go on in future depends entirely upon the ability of the city to finance Plan projects. And when a thing depends upon the ability of the city of Chicago, it depends upon a very solid and a very splendid thing.
The Chicago Club is the rich, substantial club of the city, an organization which may perhaps be compared with the Union Club of New York, although the inner atmosphere of the Chicago Club seems somehow less formal than that of its New York prototype. However, that is true in general where Chicago clubs and New York clubs are compared.
The University Club of Chicago has a very large and handsome building in the Gothic style, with a dining room said to be the handsomest club dining room in the world: a Gothic hall with fine stained-glass windows. Between this clubhouse and the great Gothic piles of the Chicago University there exists an agreeable, though perhaps quite accidental, architectural harmony.
Excepting Washington University, in St. Louis, Chicago University is the one great American college I have seen which seems fully to have anticipated its own vastness, and prepared for it with comprehensive plans for the grouping of its buildings. Architecturally it is already exceedingly harmonious and effective, for its great halls, all of gray Bedford stone, are beginning to be toned by the Chicago smoke into what will some day be Oxonian mellowness. Even now, by virtue of its ancient architecture, its great size and massiveness, it is not without an effect of age--an effect which is, however, violently disputed by the young trees of the campus. Though these trees have grown as fast as they could, they have not been able to keep up with the growth of the great institution of learning, fertilized, as it has been, by Mr. Rockefeller's millions. Instead of shading the university, the campus trees are shaded by it.