The Autobiography of an Idea

with wild shouting. Then, all to the windows. Louis saw, far below, not pavement and sidewalks, but a solid black mass of frantic men, crowded, jammed from wall to wall. The offices of Jay Cooke & Co. were but a short distance south on Third street. Word came up that Jay Cooke & Co. had just closed its doors. Louis saw it all, as he could see down both Chestnut street and Third. Chestnut westward from Third also was a solid mass. The run on the banks had begun. The devastating panic of 1873 was on, in its mad career. Louis was shocked, appalled at the sight. He was too young, too inexperienced, to understand what it really meant, even when told it was a panic in finance, that credit had crumbled to dust, that men were ruined, and insane with despair; that this panic would spread like wildfire over the land leaving ruin in its wake everywhere. And still he could not understand what had brought it about.

The office held steady for a while; there was work on hand which had progressed so far that it must be completed.

One day in November Frank Furness said: “Sullivan, I’m sorry, the jig is up. There’ll be no more building. The office now is running dry. You’ve done well, mighty well. I like you. I wish you might stay. But as you were the last to come it is only just you should be first to go.” With that he slipped a bill into Louis’s hand, and wished him farewell and better days.

Within a week Louis took the Pennsylvania train for Chicago. He saw the great valley of the Susquehanna; surmounted the huge Alleghenies; passed along the great descending Horseshoe Curve, the marvel of the day; and then night fell. He was aroused and broadened by what he had seen. It was all new. His map was enlarged. So was his breadth of view; his inner wealth.

Next morning he was utterly amazed and bewildered at the sight of the prairies of northern Indiana. They were startling in novelty. How could such things be! Stretching like a floor to the far horizon⁠—not a tree except by a watercourse or on a solitary “island.” It was amazing. Here was power⁠—power greater than the mountains. Soon Louis caught glimpses of a great lake, spreading also like a floor to the far horizon, superbly beautiful in color, under a lucent sky. Here again was power, naked power, naked as the prairies, greater than the mountains. And over all spanned the dome of the sky, resting on the rim of the horizon far away on all sides, eternally calm overhead, holding an atmosphere pellucid and serene. And here again was a power, a vast open power, a power greater than the tiny mountains. Here, in full view, was the light of the world, companion of the earth, a power greater than the lake and the prairie below, but not greater than man in his power: So Louis thought.

The train neared the city; it broke into the city; it plowed its way through miles of shanties disheartening and dirty gray. It reached its terminal at an open shed. Louis tramped the platform, stopped, looked toward the city, ruins around him; looked at the sky; and as one alone, stamped his foot, raised his hand and cried in full voice:

“This is the place for me!”

That day was the day before Thanksgiving in the year Eighteen Hundred Seventy-three.

XI

Chicago

Heard and seen by all stands the word personality, in solitary and unique grandeur. Heard and seen by all stands the word Personality, eminent, respectable, much admired.

Heard and seen by all in the crowd it calls together, and through which it deftly wanders like a shrewd hunchback, the word personality, now a dwarf, grimaces salaciously.

And now it is a word on fire; a tiger in the jungle; a python hanging from the limb, very still.

How deep, how shallow is that which we call the soul.

How monstrous, how fluent, how vagrant and timorous, how alert are the living things we call words. They are the giants and the fairies, the hobgoblins and the sprites; the warrior and the priest, the lowly and the high; the watchdog and the sheep; the tyrant and the slave⁠—of that wonder-world we call speech.

How like hammers they strike. How like aspens they quiver. How like a crystal pool, a rivulet therefrom, becomes a river moving sinuously between the hills, growing stronger, broader as its affluents pour in their tributary power; and now looms the estuary, and the Ocean of Life.

Words are most malignant, the most treacherous possession of mankind. They are saturated with the sorrows of all time. They hold in most unstable equilibrium the vast heritage of man’s folly, his despair, his wrestling with the angel whose name is Fate; his vanity, his pride before a fall, his ever-resurrecting hope⁠—arising as a winged spirit from the grave of disaster, to flit in the sunshine for a while, to return to the dust and arise again as his civilizations, so laboriously built up, have crumbled one by one. And yet all the beauty, all the joy, all the love that man has known, all his kindness, all his yearnings, all his dreams for better things; his passionate desire for peace and an anchorage within a universe that has filled him with fear and mystery and adoration; his daily round of toil, and commonplaces; his assumption of things as they are; his lofty and sublime contemplations, his gorgeous imageries; his valor, his dogged will, his patience in long suffering, his ecstacies, his sacrifices small and great⁠—even to the casting aside of his life for a thought, a compassion, an ambition⁠—all these are held bound up in words; hence words are dangerous when let loose. They may mean man’s destruction, they may signify a way out of the dark. For Light is a word, Courage is a word, and Vision is another. Therefore, it is wise