tion. Chicago has to-day a population variously estimated from 1,785,000 to 1,820,000. Her park system, including the additions now being made or authorized, is 3,174 acres. This does not take account of forty-nine miles of boulevards, one particular in which she is second to New York with her sixty-one miles. In the matter of actual park acreage, among American cities Chicago stands seventh, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Newark, N. J., and its environs, Philadelphia and San Francisco ranking ahead of her; but as regards the effective distribution of park areas, she ranks thirty-second among cities having a population of 100,000 or more. Within her limits there are 122,008 acres of land, that is, thirty-eight acres of city to one of park, and of inhabitants there are 590.4 to each park acre. This hardly states the problem, however, for there are six river wards with

out so much as an open square; twenty-three wards, with a population of more than a million people, which contain 228 acres of park space, or 4,720 people to each acre. The stock-yards district, with a population of 100,000, Englewood, with 150,000, the great manufacturing center at South Chicago-all are without park facilities. The Chicago River for almost its entire length within the city limits is lined with warehouses and docks; the lake, the most beautiful and health-giving feature of our landscape, has but 10.78 miles of the 25.21 miles within the limits of the city, reserved for the people.

When we speak of overcrowding, we are wont to turn to foreign cities and lands other than our own, and to ignore the fact that conditions worse than any abroad exist in our own American cities. Bombay is not so badly crowded as New

York and Chicago. The Josephstadt in Prague has only four hundred people to the acre, while Manhattan has one thousand. We have space enough here in America. To do away with overcrowding is the problem of our large cities. Chicago is wrestling with hers now. Her development has been all in one direction. In furthering her business and commercial interests, she has neglected questions of health and comfort until things have come to such a pass

A PATHWAY IN LINCOLN PARK.

that drastic measures are necessary. She has builded without foresight and wisdom-a thing not infrequent in the history of cities. Napoleon, more than a century ago, tore down the ramshackle old buildings of old Paris and laid out a practically new city, with wide and regular streets and boulevards. New York has spent $4,000,000 putting breathing places in her slums. For the land for Mulberry Bend Park, only

2.75 acres, she paid $1,500,000, and for the Seward Park, 2.625 acres, $2,500,000. Yet to say that Chicago has really neglected the question of parks is not a fair statement. She has had parks almost from the day of her incorporation as a city. Dearborn Park, a plat of ground now occupied by the Chicago Public Library, was the first of these. Her principal parks were acquired in the sixties. and seventies, but the first movement of a systematic or general character came

ible to the masses of the people, there seemed little or no need for them, but there were those who urged the matter and carried it to a successful issue, serving their day and generation with wisdom and foresight. In 1880, Chicago, then the fourth city in the Union in population, was the second in the amount of its park acreage. Her growth during the past twenty-five years has been phenomenal; her old system is no longer adequate to her need.. She must make

provision for changed conditions, and look forward to the future.

To understand the proposed Metropolitan Park System, it is necessary first to understand something of the topography of Chicago and its vicinity. The city stands on a low and strikingly flat plain, roughly crescentic in form, bordering the west side of the head of Lake Michigan. On its outer border, a ridge of gently rolling land extends from Winnetka on the north, through Galewood and La Grange on the west to Glenwood and Dyer, Indiana, on the southwest and south, with the greatest width-about fifteen miles, in a direction southwest from the city-at what is known 'as Mount Forest. The Chicago plain is in reality a glacial moraine. From the shore of the lake, the level of which is about 581 feet above the mean tide level in New York Harbor, it rises very gradually to a nearly uniform height of sixty feet above the lake. To the southwest and south the flatness of the plain is interrupted, and the surface attains the extreme height of two hundred feet at Chicago Heights, twenty-four miles south from the city. Through the district are a number of streams-the Chicago River, with its two Y-like branches,

in 1869, when it was proposed to have a chain of parks and boulevards, starting with Lincoln on the north, including Humboldt, Garfield, Douglas, Washington and Jackson Parks. Of course this proposition was opposed, as at that time Union Park, of seventeen acres, was sufficient for the needs of the West Side, then as now the most populous side of the city. As the parks in this chain were then in outlying districts and inaccess

the Des Plaines, and the Big and Little Calumet, and several lakes, of which Calumet is the largest. On the shore of Lake Michigan, out for a mile or more, are low-lying reefs, extending north from South Chicago and covered with water from one to fifteen feet in depth.

The city itself, from its location, is of continental and world importance. Situ

ated in the greatest producing region in America, it is a great shipping, trading, and manufacturing point, and, besides, the greatest railroad center in the world. Its canal connects it with the Mississippi and the Gulf; and the opening of the Panama Canal, giving free access to all Pacific and Asiatic points, will make it possible for it to command much of the