Part 16

Another institution, which promises to have still more influence on the city, and indeed on the whole North-west, is the Newberry Library, now organizing under an able board of trustees, who have chosen Mr. W. F. Poole as librarian. The munificent fund of the donor is now reckoned at about 82,500,000, but the value of the property will be very much more than this in a few years. A temporary building for the library, which is slowly forming, will be erected at once, but the library, which is to occupy a square on the north side, will not be erected until the plans are fully matured. It is to be a library of reference and study solely, and it is in contemplation to have the books distributed in separate rooms for each department, with ample facilities for reading and study in each room. If the library is built and the collections are made in accordance with the ample means at command, and in the spirit of its projectors, it will powerfully tend to make Chicago not only the money but the intellectual centre of the North-west, and attract to it hosts of students from all quarters. One can hardly over-estimate the influence that such a library as this may be will have upon the character and the attractiveness of the city.

I hope that it will have ample space for, and that it will receive, certain literary collections, such as are the glory and the attraction, both to students and sight-seers, of the great libraries of the world. And this leads me to speak of the treasures of Mr. Gunther, the most remarkable private collection I have ever seen, and already worthy to rank with some of the most famous on public exhibition. Mr. Gunther is a candy manufacturer, who has an archaeological and “curio” taste, and for many years has devoted an amount of money to the purchase of historical relics that if known would probably astonish the public. Only specimens of what he has can be displayed in the large apartment set apart for the purpose over his shop. The collection is miscellaneous, forming a varied and most interesting museum. It contains relics—many of them unique, and most of them having a historical value—from many lands and all periods since the Middle Ages, and is strong in relics and documents relating to our own history, from the colonial period down to the close of our civil war. But the distinction of the collection is in its original letters and manuscripts of famous people, and its missals, illuminated manuscripts, and rare books. It is hardly possible to mention a name famous since America was discovered that is not here represented by an autograph letter or some personal relics. We may pass by such mementos as the Appomattox table, a sampler worked by Queen Elizabeth, a prayer-book of Mary, Queen of Scots, personal belongings of Washington, Lincoln, and hundreds of other historical characters, but we must give a little space to the books and manuscripts, in order that it may be seen that all the wealth of Chicago is not in grain and meat.

It is only possible here to name a few of the original letters, manuscripts, and historical papers in this wonderful collection of over seventeen thousand. Most of the great names in the literature of our era are represented. There is an autograph letter of Molière, the only one known outside of France, except one in the British Museum; there are letters of Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Madame Roland, and other French writers. It is understood that this is not a collection of mere autographs, but of letters or original manuscripts of those named. In Germany, nearly all the great poets and writers—Goethe, Schiller, Uhland, Lessing, etc.; in England, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Cowper, Hunt, Gray, etc.; the manuscript of Byron’s “Prometheus,” the “Auld Lang Syne” of Burns, and his “Journal in the Highlands,” “Sweet Home” in the author’s hand; a poem by Thackeray; manuscript stories of Scott and Dickens. Among the Italians, Tasso. In America, the known authors, almost without exception. There are letters from nearly all the prominent reformers—Calvin, Melanehthon, Zwingle, Erasmus, Savonarola; a letter of Luther in regard to the Pope’s bull; letters of prominent leaders—William the Silent, John the Steadfast, Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein. There is a curious collection of letters of the saints—St. Francis de Sales, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Borromeo; letters of the Popes for three centuries and a half, and of many of the great cardinals.

I must set down a few more of the noted names, and that without much order. There is a manuscript of Charlotte Corday (probably the only one in this country), John Bunyan, Izaak Walton, John Cotton, Michael Angelo, Galileo, Lorenzo the Magnificent; letters of Queen Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary of England, Anne, several of Victoria (one at the age of twelve), Catherine de’ Medici, Marie Antoinette, Josephine, Marie Louise; letters of all the Napoleons, of Frederick the Great, Marat, Robespierre, St. Just; a letter of Hernando Cortez to Charles the Fifth; a letter of Alverez; letters of kings of all European nations, and statesmen and generals without number.

The collection is rich in colonial and Revolutionary material; original letters from Plymouth Colony, 1621, 1622,1623—I believe the only ones known; manuscript sermons of the early American ministers; letters of the first bishops, White and Seabury; letters of John André, Nathan Hale, Kosciusko, Pulaski, De Kalb, Steuben, and of great numbers of the general and subordinate officers of the French and Revolutionary wars; William Tudor’s manuscript account of the battle of Bunker Hill; a letter of Aide-de-camp Robert Orhm to the Governor of Pennsylvania relating Braddock’s defeat; the original of Washington’s first Thanksgiving proclamation; the report of the committee of the Continental Congress on its visit to Valley Forge on the distress of the army; the original proceedings of the Commissioners of the Colonies at Cambridge for the organization of the Continental army; original returns of the Hessians captured at Princeton; orderly books of the Continental army; manuscripts and surveys of the early explorers; letters of Lafitte, the pirate, Paul Jones, Captain Lawrence, Bainbridge, and so on. Documents relating to the Washington family are very remarkable: the original will of Lawrence Washington bequeathing Mount Vernon to George; will of John Custis to his family; letters of Martha, of Mary, the mother of George, of Betty Lewis, his sister, of all his step and grand children of the Custis family.

In music there are the original manuscript compositions of all the leading musicians in our modern world, and there is a large collection of the choral books from ancient monasteries and churches. There are exquisite illuminated missals on parchment of all periods from the eighth century. Of the large array of Bibles and other early printed books it is impossible to speak, except in a general way. There is a copy of the first English Bible, Coverdale’s, also of the very rare second Matthews, and of most of the other editions of the English Bible; the first Scotch, Irish, French, Welsh, and German Luther Bibles; the first Eliot’s Indian Bible, of 1662, and the second, of 1685; the first American Bibles; the first American primers, almanacs, newspapers, and the first patent, issued in 1794; the first book printed in Boston; the first printed accounts of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia; the first picture of New York City, an original plan of the city in 1700, and one of it in 1765; early surveys of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York; the earliest maps of America, including the first, second, and third map of the world in which America appears.

Returning to England, there are the Shakespeare folio editions of 1632 and 1685; the first of his printed “Poems” and the “Rape of Lucrece;” an early quarto of “Othello;” the first edition of Ben Jonson, 1616, in which Shakespeare’s name appears in the cast for a play; and letters from the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s friend, and Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and Essex. There is also a letter written by Oliver Cromwell while he was engaged in the conquest of Ireland.

The relics, documents, and letters illustrating our civil war are constantly being added to. There are many old engravings, caricatures, and broadsides. Of oil-portraits there are three originals of Washington, one by Stuart, one by Peale, one by Polk, and I think I remember one or two miniatures. There is also a portrait in oil of Shakespeare which may become important. The original canvas has been remounted, and there are indubitable signs of its age, although the picture can be traced back only about one hundred and fifty years. The Owner hopes to be able to prove that it is a contemporary work. The interesting fact about it is that whilc it is not remarkable as a work of art, it is recognizable at once as a likeness of what we suppose from other portraits and the busts to be the face and head of Shakespeare, and yet it is different from all other pictures w know, so that it does not suggest itself as a copy.

The most important of Mr. Gunther’s collection is an autograph of Shakespeare; if it prove to be genuine, it will be one of the four in the world, and a great possession for America. This autograph is pasted on the fly-leaf of a folio of 1632, which was the property of one John Ward. In 1839 there was published in London, from manuscripts in possession of the Medical Society, extracts from the diary of John Ward (1648-1679), who was vicar and doctor at Stratford-on-Avon. It is to this diary that we owe certain facts theretofore unknown about Shakespeare. The editor, Mr. Stevens, had this volume in his hands while he was compiling his book, and refers to it in his preface. He supposed it to have belonged to the John Ward, vicar, who kept the diary. It turns out, however, to have been the property of John Ward the actor, who was in Stratford in 1740, was an enthusiast in the revival of Shakespeare, and played Hamlet there in order to raise money to repair the bust of the poet in the church. This folio has the appearance of being much used. On the fly-leaf is writing by Ward and his signature; there are marginal notes and directions in his hand, and several of the pages from which parts were torn off have been repaired by manuscript text neatly joined.

The Shakespeare signature is pasted on the leaf above Ward’s name. The paper on which it is written is unlike that of the book in texture. The slip was pasted on when the leaf was not as brown as it is now, as can be seen at one end where it is lifted. The signature is written out fairly and in full, William Shakspeare, like the one to the will, and differs from the two others, which are hasty scrawls, as if the writer were cramped for room, or finished off the last syllable with a flourish, indifferent to the formation of the letters. I had the opportunity to compare it with a careful tracing of the signature to the will sent over by Mr. Hallowell-Phillips. At first sight the two signatures appear to be identical; but on examination they are not; there is just that difference in the strokes, spaces, and formation of the letters that always appears in two signatures by the same hand. One is not a copy of the other, and the one in the folio had to me the unmistakable stamp of genuineness. The experts in handwriting and the micro-scopists in this country who have examined ink and paper as to antiquity, I understand, regard it as genuine.

There seems to be all along the line no reason to suspect forgery. What more natural than that John Ward, the owner of the book, and a Shakespeare enthusiast, should have enriched his beloved volume with an autograph which he found somewhere in Stratford? And in 1740 there was no craze or controversy about Shakespeare to make the forgery of his autograph an object. And there is no suspicion that the book has been doctored for a market. It never was sold for a price. It was found in Utah, whither it had drifted from England in the possession of an emigrant, and he readily gave it in exchange for a new and fresh edition of Shakespeare’s works.

I have dwelt upon this collection at some length, first because of its intrinsic value, second because of its importance to Chicago as a nucleus for what (I hope in connection with the Newberry Library) will become one of the most interesting museums in the country, and lastly as an illustration of what a Western business man may do with his money.

New York is the first and Chicago the second base of operations on this continent—the second in point of departure, I will not say for another civilization, but for a great civilizing and conquering movement, at once a reservoir and distributing point of energy, power, and money. And precisely here is to be fought out and settled some of the most important problems concerning labor, supply, and transportation. Striking as are the operations of merchants, manufacturers, and traders, nothing in the city makes a greater appeal to the imagination than the railways that centre there, whether we consider their fifty thousand miles of track, the enormous investment in them, or their competition for the carrying trade of the vast regions they pierce, and apparently compel to be tributary to the central city. The story of their building would read like a romance, and a simple statement of their organization, management, and business rivals the affairs of an empire. The present development of a belt road round the city, to serve as a track of freight exchange for all the lines, like the transfer grounds between St. Paul and Minneapolis, is found to be an affair of great magnitude, as must needs be to accommodate lines of traffic that represent an investment in stock and bonds of $1,305,000,000.

As it is not my purpose to describe the railway systems of the West, but only to speak of some of the problems involved in them, it will suffice to mention two of the leading corporations. Passing by the great eastern lines, and those like the Illinois Central, and the Chicago, Alton, and St. Louis, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, which are operating mainly to the south and south-west, and the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, one of the greatest corporations, with a mileage which had reached 4921, December 1, 1885, and has increased since, we may name the Chicago and North-western, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. Each of these great systems, which has grown by accretion and extension and consolidations of small roads, operates over four thousand miles of road, leaving out from the North-western’s mileage that of the Omaha system, which it controls. Looked at on the map, each of these systems completely occupies a vast territory, the one mainly to the north of the other, but they interlace to some extent and parallel each other in very important competitions.

The North-western system, which includes, besides the lines that-have its name, the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha, the Fremont; Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley, and several minor roads, occupies northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, sends a line along Lake Michigan to Lake Superior, with branches, a line to St. Paul, with branches tapping Lake Superior again at Bayfield and Duluth, sends another trunk line, with branches, into the far fields of Dakota, drops down a tangle of lines through Iowa and into Nebraska, sends another great line through northern Nebraska into Wyoming, with a divergence into the Black Hills, and runs all these feeders into Chicago by another trunk line from Omaha. By the report of 1887 the gross earnings of this system (in round numbers) were over twenty-six millions, expenses over twenty millions, leaving a net income of over six million dollars. In these items the receipts for freight were over nineteen millions, and from passengers less than six millions. Not to enter into confusing details, the magnitude of the system is shown in the general balance-sheet for May, 1887, when the cost of road (4101 miles), the sinking funds, the general assets, and the operating assets foot up $176,048,000. Over 3500 miles of this road are laid with steel rails; the equipment required 735 engines and over 23,000 cars of all sorts. It is worthy of note that a table makes the net earnings of 4000 miles of road, 1887, only a little more than those of 3000 miles of road in 1882—a greater gain evidently to the public than to the railroad.

In speaking of this system territorially, I have included the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha, but not in the above figures. The two systems have the same president, but different general managers and other officials, and the reports are separate. To the over 4000 miles of the other North-western lines, therefore, are to be added the 1360 miles of the Omaha system (report of December, 1886, since considerably increased). The balance-sheet of the Omaha system (December, 1886) shows a cost of over fifty-seven millions. Its total net earnings over operating expenses and taxes were about $2,304,000. It then required an equipment of 194 locomotives and about 6000 cars. These figures are not, of course, given for specific railroad information, but merely to give a general idea of the magnitude of operations. This may be illustrated by another item. During the year for which the above figures have been given the entire North-western system ran on the average 415 passenger and 732 freight trains each day through the year. It may also be an interesting comparison to say that all the railways in Connecticut, including those that run into other States, have 416 locomotives, 668 passenger cars, and 11,502 other cars, and that their total mileage in the State is 1405 miles.

The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy (report of December, 1886) was operating 4036 miles of road. Its only eccentric development was the recent Burlington and Northern, up the Mississippi River to St. Paul. Its main stem from Chicago branches out over northern and western Illinois, runs down to St. Louis, from thence to Kansas City by way of Hannibal, has a trunk line to Omaha, criss-crosses northern Missouri and southern Iowa, skirts and pierces Kansas, and fairly occupies three-quarters of Nebraska with a network of tracks, sending out lines north of the Platte, and one to Cheyenne and one to Denver. The whole amount of stock and bonds, December, 1886, was reported at $155,920,000. The gross earnings for 1886 were over twenty-six millions (over nineteen of which was for freight and over five for passengers), operating expenses over fourteen millions, leaving over twelve millions net earnings. The system that year paid eight per cent, dividends (as it had done for a long series of years), leaving over fixed charges and dividends about a million and a half to be carried to surplus or construction outlays. The equipment for the year required 619 engines and over 24,000 cars. These figures do not give the exact present condition of the road, but only indicate the magnitude of its affairs.

Both these great systems have been well managed, and both have been, and continue to be, great agents in developing the West. Both have been profitable to investors. The comparatively small cost of building roads in the West and the profit hitherto have invited capital, and stimulated the construction of roads not absolutely needed. There are too many miles of road for capitalists. Are there too many for the accommodation of the public? What locality would be willing to surrender its road?

It is difficult to understand the attitude of the Western Granger and the Western Legislatures towards the railways, or it would be if we didn’t understand pretty well the nature of demagogues the world over. The people are everywhere crazy for roads, for more and more roads. The whole West we are considering is made by railways. Without them the larger part of it would be uninhabitable, the lands of small value, produce useless for want of a market. No railways, no civilization. Year by year settlements have increased in all regions touched by railways, land has risen in price, and freight charges have diminished. And yet no sooner do the people get the railways near them than they become hostile to the companies; hostility to railway corporations seems to be the dominant sentiment in the Western mind, and the one most naturally invoked by any political demagogue who wants to climb up higher in elective office. The roads are denounced as “monopolies”—a word getting to be applied to any private persons who are successful in business—and their consolidation is regarded as a standing menace to society.

Of course it goes without saying that great corporations with exceptional privileges are apt to be arrogant, unjust, and grasping, and especially when, as in the case of railways, they unite private interests and public functions, they need the restraint of law and careful limitations of powers. But the Western situation is nevertheless a very curious one. Naturally when capital takes great risks it is entitled to proportionate profits; but profits always encourage competition, and the great Western lines are already in a war for existence that does not need much unfriendly legislation to make fatal. In fact, the lowering of rates in railway wars has gone on so rapidly of late years that the most active Granger Legislature cannot frame hostile bills fast enough to keep pace with it. Consolidation is objected to. Yet this consideration must not be lost sight of: the West is cut up by local roads that could not be maintained; they would not pay running expenses if they had not been made parts of a great system. Whatever may be the danger of the consolidation system, the country has doubtless benefited by it.