THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 513
Chicago as a point for supplies, this market had grown to immense proportions by 1880. On the bread- and meat-supply business had been built the so-called "Granger Railroads," and their development was followed by the locating in Chicago of manufacturing plants for the making of all sorts of goods. All this called for more railroads.
Seven new main lines were built into the city during the eighties. This made the total number of trunk lines with ter- minals in Chicago an even twenty, which, according to Blanchard, was the full quota of "railroads entering Chicago on their own tracks August i, 1900." Chicago became not only a receiving point for raw materials, but the growth of the railway systems made the city the center of a most striking example of that which was denned by Herbert Spencer in his elaborate analogy between the structure of society and that of an animal organism, as the "social distributing system."
As it took a multitude of people to handle all this market, manufacturing, and railway business, the number increased so rapidly that by 1880 Chicago had, in population, become the metropolis of the West. The census of 1880 showed that in num- bers of people Chicago had far surpassed St. Louis, which had before led in the states west of the Alleghanies. In that year Chicago's population was more than half a million by several thousand. This meant a large distribution of any marketable commodity for consumers within the city itself. But the popu- lation of the Middle West, Northwest, and Southwest, increasing proportionately, made a larger market. Chicago became the chief inland distributing center, not only for life-sustaining products food, clothing, druggists' supplies, and lumber for housing but also for material luxuries, and finally for those classes of goods designed to satisfy the aesthetic interest.
Among the many jobbing-houses which had grown to large proportions by 1880, one of the most notable was that of a firm whose largest business was in book- jobbing. This was the McClurg house, known since 1886 by the firm name of A. C. McClurg & Co., which today, in a nine-story building, does, besides a large retail book-selling business and a good amount of
