Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, transcendent--call it what you like--throw the dictionary at it! It is all that you can do, except to shoot it with statistics. And even the statistics of Chicago are not deadly, as most statistics are.
First, you must realize that Chicago stands fourth in population among the cities of the world, and second among those of the Western Hemisphere. Next you must realize that there are people still alive who were alive when Chicago did not exist, even as a fort in a swamp at the mouth of the Chicago River--the river from which, by the way, the city took its name, and which in turn took its own name from an Indian word meaning "skunk."
I do not claim that there are many people still alive who were alive when Chicago wasn't there at all, or that such people are feeling very active, or that they remember much about it, for in 102 years a man forgets a lot of little things. Nevertheless, there _are_ living men older than Chicago.
Just one hundred years ago Fort Dearborn, at the mouth of the river, was being rebuilt, after a massacre by the Indians. Eighty-five years ago Chicago was a village of one hundred people. Sixty-five years ago this village had grown into a city of approximately the present size of Evanston--a suburb of Chicago, with less than thirty thousand people. Fifty-five years ago Chicago had something over one hundred thousand inhabitants. Forty-five years ago, at the time of the Chicago fire, the city was as large as Washington is now--over three hundred thousand. In the ten years which followed the disaster, Chicago was not only entirely rebuilt, and very much improved, but also it increased in population to half a million, or about the size of Detroit. In the next decade it actually doubled in size, so that, twenty-five years ago, it passed the million mark. Soon after that it pushed Philadelphia from second place among American cities. So it has gone on, until to-day it has a population of two million, plus a city of about the size of San Francisco for full measure.
There are the statistics in a capsule paragraph. I hope you will feel better in the morning. And just to take the taste away, here's another item which you may like because of its curious flavor: Chicago has more Poles than any other city except Warsaw.