Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/277

 THE EARLIER BUILDINGS 241 first building of the new University. In this brief period of thirty- one months thirteen buildings had been erected. They had cost, with their equipment and furniture, about fourteen hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It must be said that this vast expenditure, in so short a time, had involved the new institution in debt. But it should also be said that this was not owing to any lack of liber- ality on the part of those who had so freely given their money, but to the extraordinary expansion in the scope of the institution's work and plans, and to the apparent impossibility of keeping the ultimate cost of the buildings within the estimates. Happily for the young University, efforts were already under way to remove this peril which threatened its future.