Biographical Sketches Of The Leading Men Of Chicago

Excerpt from Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men of Chicago "Art is long, but Life is short," is a proverb which, in its Latin form, "Ars longa, vita brevis," has been handed down through the ages and passed from lip to lip by savans and students. But it was reserved to the men of the present century to exhibit a living faith in the apothegm, by crowding into the experience of a decade the activities of a patriarchal term of existence. Man lived, and learned, and labored in former days, and improvements in his condition were effected, but the processes were slow; human elevation was wrought out like the toilsome accretions of the coral reef, whose crest is reared up from the ocean valley only by the scarcely sensible additions of untold centuries, by myriads of laborers, whose work was but the construction of their own tomb. We of the present day can compare with them but by contrast. The progress of the past fifty years has been rather that of the force which upheaves an island in a day, or builds a palace in a night. Within that short period several peoples have been raised to the condition of freemen, the yoke of bondage has been stricken from the necks of a race, the mirror of science burnished up from a few bright spots on its surface, education has become popularized, a continent settled, and steam made useful; the iron horse, unfoaled at the commencement of that cycle, is now pawing his way through every land, and neighing his triumph from the tops of the Rocky Mountains, while the electric spark has flashed intelligence into every hamlet, and wakened into life the slumbering activities of a world. Fifty years! Less than the life of one man, the last half century has been more heavily laden with human happiness than the whole of that preceding period of a hundred lunar cycles, at whose beginning was borne through the air by angel voices the glad tidings - "Peace on earth; goodwill to men!" And yet we may lessen the duration of even that brief jubilee by a quarter. Thirty-seven years ago, the passage of the Reform Bill in Great Britain opened the path along which the masses of England are now marching towards liberty; in the same year (1831) Cook County was organized and the first actual step made towards opening up the interior of the American continent to travel and discovery, though the passage of the Canal Bill three years previously was the order to hew out a path in the wilderness. Since then, freedom and progress have been the watchwords of civilization. Six years thereafter the negroes in Jamaica were freed, and Chicago was made a city. Both were but beginnings, but the results have been magnificent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.