Excerpt from Chicago, Its History and Its Builders, Vol. 1: A Century of Marvelous Growth As the French say, the secret of wearying isto say all, which, if indeed it is in some measure accomplished, results in a compendium of tedious prolixity. Any one who has investigated any period, says Rhodes, knows how the same facts are told over and over again, in different ways, by various writers, and among them all one must choose from the mass of verbiage and make condensations. Thucydides, the famous Greek historian, wrote a history of the Peloponnesian war covering a period of twenty - four years. This history is a model of com pressed narrative, and in his time there was little or no help to be derived from written documents. Of the events of the war, wrote Thucydides, I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye witnesses of the same occurrences gave different ac counts of them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other. 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.