Prof.  Potwins, the most eminent of our statisticians, figures that we now have in the midst of us either a poet or an author to every square yard within the corporate limits, and he estimates that in ten years’ time we shall have a literary output large enough to keep all the rest of the world reading all the time.

  Our trade has been increasing, too.  Last September 382,098 cattle
  were received, against 330,994 in September of 1889.  So far this year
  the increase over 1889 in the receipts of hogs is 2,000,000.

  Last year not more than 2,700 young authors contributed stories to
  the Christmas number of the Daily News:  this year the number of
  contributors reached 6,125.

Hitherto the rivalry between our trade and our literature has been friendly to a degree.  The packer has patronized the poet; metaphorically speaking, the hog and the epic have lain down together and wallowed in the same Parnassan pool.  The censers that have swung continually in the temple of the muses have been replenished with lard oil, and to our grateful olfactories has the joyous Lake breezes wafted the refreshing odors of sonnets and of slaughter pens commingled.

But how long is this sort of thing going to last?  It surely cannot be the millennium.  These twin giants will some day—­alas, too soon—­learn their powers and be greedy to test them against one another.  A fatal jealousy seems to be inevitable; it may be fended off, but how?

The world’s fair will be likely to precipitate a conflict between the interests of which we speak.  Each interest is already claiming precedence, and we hear with alarm that less than a week ago one of our most respected packers threatened to withdraw his support of the international copyright bill unless the Chicago Literary Society united in an indorsement of his sugar-cured hams.

When we think of the horrors that will attend and follow a set-to between Chicago trade and Chicago literature, we are prone to cry out, in the words of the immortal Moore—­not Tom—­but Mrs. Julia A., of Michigan: 

    An awful tremor quakes the soul! 
      And makes the heart to quiver,
    While up and down the spine doth roll
      A melancholy shiver.

In December, 1895, Edmund Clarence Stedman contributed to the “Souvenir Book” of the New York Hebrew Fair a charmingly appreciative, yet justly critical, tribute to Eugene Field, whom he likened to Shakespeare’s Yorick, whose “motley covered the sweetest nature and tenderest heart.”  Mr. Stedman there speaks of Field as a “complex American with the obstreperous bizarrerie of the frontier and the artistic delicacy of our oldest culture always at odds within him—­but he was above all a child of nature, a frolic incarnate, and just as he would have been in any time or country.”  He also tells how Field put their friendship to one