The longer and bitter fight about the fire limits was decided the day before yesterday in the City Council - in favor of the Illinois Staats Zeitung and the Evening Mail and against the Tribune, Times, Evening Journal, Evening Post and Robert Collyer. On the fourth page our readers will find a map that shows the adopted limit. The whole extent of the map was the fire district as the four papers wanted it - of that the district as it has now been defined, not much more than one-fourth, exactly nine English square miles, while the area of the whole city amounts to thirty-five square miles.......

Not without some satisfaction can we look back on a fight, in which the Illinois Staats Zeitung in the beginning stood all alone and later on, supported only by the smallest of the English evening papers, had to face not only the whole English daily press but even the pulpit; - a fight in which the brutal despicableness of the adversary went so far as to threaten us even with criminal indictments and the promise of a sentence for rebellion; a fight from which we finally emerged as victors...

Before Mr. Medill in his message published the absurd plan not to permit the building of any but stone houses on an area of 22,500 acres of which not even 12,000 had been at all built on......probably not a hundred mentally normal people in the city had thought of the possibility that somebody might recommend such a plan in sober seriousness. Because every Chicagoan was aware that the city owed its miraculously fast growth to the wood buildings.....However, the number of Americans who have the courage to stand by their own convictions against their regular source of ideas, their paper, is not large. So it happened that for several weeks indeed the mad idea of Medill's seemed to be the public opinion of the Americans. To make quite sure of it, the Times and Tribune employed the infamous means of characterizing every resistance to the insane idea as Dutch.....Finally an unctuous servant of God, was ushered unto the battle field for the sake of a sermon, that, in spite of its smooth form was an insult to the Germans, because its burden was that the Germans did not understand their duties as American citizens. The answer Mr. Collyer got understand their duties as American citizens. The answer Mr. Collyer got for that from Mr. Hesing effected the first decisive turn of public opinion.