When I left New York and went to Washington I was congratulated on having quitted the false America for the real.  When I came to Boston I received the sympathies of everybody in Boston on having been put off for so long with spurious imitations of America, and a sigh of happy relief went up that I had at length got into touch with a genuine American city.  When, after a long pilgrimage, I attained Chicago, I was positively informed that Chicago alone was the gate of the United States, and that everything east of Chicago was negligible and even misleading.  And when I entered Indianapolis I discovered that Chicago was a mushroom and a suburb of Warsaw, and that its pretension to represent the United States was grotesque, the authentic center of the United States being obviously Indianapolis....  The great towns love thus to affront one another, and their demeanor in the game resembles the gamboling of young tigers—­it is half playful and half ferocious.  For myself, I have to say that my heart was large enough to hold all I saw.  While I admit that Indianapolis struck me as very characteristically American, I assert that the unreality of New York escaped me.  It appeared to me that New York was quite a real city, and European geographies (apt to err, of course, in matters of detail) usually locate it in America.

Having regard to the healthy mutual jealousy of the great towns, I feel that I am carrying audacity to the point of foolhardiness when I state that the streets of every American city I saw reminded me on the whole rather strongly of the streets of all the others.  What inhabitants of what city could forgive this?  Yet I must state it.  Much of what I have said of the streets of New York applies, in my superficial opinion, for instance, to the streets of Chicago.  It is well known that to the Chinaman all Westerners look alike.  No tourist on his first visit to a country so astonishing as the United States is very different from a Chinaman; the tourist should reconcile himself to that deep truth.  It is desolating to think that a second visit will reveal to me the blindness, the distortions, and the wrong-headedness of my first.  But even as a Chinaman I did notice subtle differences between New York and Chicago.  As one who was brought up in a bleak and uncanny climate, where soft coal is in universal use, I at once felt more at home in Chicago than I could ever do in New York.  The old instinct to wash the hands and change the collar every couple of hours instantly returned to me in Chicago, together with the old comforting conviction that a harsh climate is a climate healthy for body and spirit.  And, because it is laden with soot, the air of Chicago is a great mystifier and beautifier.  Atmospheric effects may be seen there that are unobtainable without the combustion of soft coal.  Talk, for example, as much as you please about the electric sky-signs of Broadway—­not all of them together will write as much poetry on the sky as the single word “Illinois” that hangs without a clue to its suspension in the murky dusk over Michigan Avenue.  The visionary aspects of Chicago are incomparable.