I have recevd yours of 21st. The objection to the Small Pox Hospital lies in the effect it will have on the imaginations of the people. Of course the park is the last place in all of the unoccupied suburbs of the city where it can stand appropriately and there is no position in the park where it can go without being an offence to good taste.

The special objection to the position you suggest is that a small pox hospital there would render valueless good house lots, now city property but which may otherwise be expected in a few years to be brought favorably into the market with the advantages of frontage on the park, of a street railroad passing close by, of good roads, and a near market, church, post office &c (at St Jean Baptiste). Also that it would be even at present much nearer to this village than it is proper to place such a hospital. St Jean Baptiste, whenever the park begins to exist as a park, will be sure to gain rapidly in population and prosperity and will spread over the park lands. There is no ground in the rear of the Hotel Dieu in which the necessary buildings could stand so that there would be a space of more than a hundred feet between them and a public road, as roads are proposed and will soon need to be laid out. I have no doubt that it will in the end cost the city a great deal more if the hospital is placed [314] here than in the location I have advised. The latter is much the more isolated site really and apparently.

The objection you present does not appear to me weighty for this reason. The site you propose would be closely passed in going to the other which I have suggested, therefore until after passing that point, whichever is taken, the same route would ordinarily and might by regulation always be followed. The occasion for moving patients is not frequent. They should be moved in close vehicles in no way specially noticable and they would rarely be observed or known to be bound for the hospital until after leaving the public road. The actual danger is nothing. The only important question is that of the remoteness of the hospital itself and in this respect the site I advise has obviously very greatly the advantage.

I think that it would prove a great injury to your property to place the hospital anywhere between Bleury Street or the Frothingham property and St. Jean Baptiste.

As to your inquiry about planting, a little reflection will show you that if trees could be made to grow in rows at regular intervals on each side of the present wheel way of your half built road up the mountain they would simply call attention to and make more marked the present prominent, rude, artificial character of the cuttings and embankments between which it is carried. These have been made with such misunderstanding of the purpose with which the road was laid out that I believe that it would be true economy to tear the whole work up and build it over again. But if it is out of the question as I suppose it is just now, there is little to be done to improve the road until you begin the excavation for the Reservoir. Every spade full that comes from that should be used with the greatest possible care and judgement to hide and make less conspicuous the unnatural character of the embankment on which the road rests. When this has been done, but not before, it will be desirable to plant trees & bushes near it, not by any means in rows and at regular intervals but naturally, in groups and clusters and thickets, with frequent glades and openings where under favorable circumstances distant views can be best commanded.

What you chiefly need at present is to be getting the proper assortment of trees and shrubs for the purpose growing in proper permanent nurseries, particularly the Siberian trees & others which I recommended you to get as seedlings from Scotland.

Planting such as you did last year without system or design is a waste of money.

A controversy has lately grown out of the changes of plan which have been adopted for the new capitol of this state in the heat, haste and confusion of which we apprehend that there is danger that a too prevalent impression may with some be confirmed and strengthened. For this reason rather than because we wish to appear as partisans of either of the plans in dispute we think that while the public mind is more than usually awake to the matter, a word of caution may be timely.

The impression referred to is of this nature.

That the essence of architecture lies in overlaying the substantial structure of a building with what are termed architectural forms applied in certain combinations suggested by personal fancy, these having no necessary relation to the uses, purposes, or materials of the building but selected and used with this single qualification, that they have been taken from the store house of history and all belong to a given period of time, or if belonging to two or more periods that they have heretofore been joined together by someone who has himself by the lapse of time become historical.

This impression is a false and a pernicious one. Architecture is the Art [316] of building, not merely of ornamenting nor in any way of veiling or covering up of a building. It is a living art; an art which deals always directly with its special problems as they arise, seeking first of all to use its materials in the best mechanical way for the particular purpose in hand; looking to the past not for forms but for the cause of forms, and avoiding all useless construction, uncalled for ornament and especially all imitation in one situation or in one material of forms appropriate to another situation and another material.

It is only in this way that architectural monuments have ever been produced, the merits of which are recognized at all times, by men of all degrees of culture, under all changes of fashion. The unity of style which distinguishes such structures is never due simply to the reproduction or imitation of forms first designed in adaptation to conditions of an earlier age or to the needs and customs of a different people and which are for the time in which they are built without meaning or life, but to the direct rational and logical process by which they have been built.

But let us give the question a practical form, a form in which if it does not come before us today it may tomorrow.

Supposing a great and costly building to have been already partly erected which under the rule we have laid down is not a work of true architecture, its plain rude exterior walls having been superficially overlaid with copies of parts of old buildings all possibly in one style but which as to that which is within have no meaning. Suppose that it cannot be taken down, one question is whether it is the duty of an architect always to carry it on as it has been begun?

We answer unhesitatingly that it is not. It is the duty of the architect as soon as possible to deal with it rationally and frankly for what it is; to make outside as far as it is in his power expressive of that which is within, to give it outwardly as well as inwardly a life and a character of its own. Then also if he is allowed it is his duty to touch carefully what has already been done, bringing it as far as may be into an essential harmony with that which is built upon it. {It is his duty to adjust that which is bad to that which is good, not that which is unformed to that which is bad.}

Not all of us have had an opportunity of examining the capitol at Albany and it is not our duty to pronounce whether it is or is not a case in point.

We simply would not, on any account, have it supposed that if it had been so, if its exterior had at any stage in its progress been found by an architect called in consultation by the state, to be inappropriate, insignificant, meaningless with reference to its purpose, its interior arrangment and its construction, that there is any rule or established understanding in our profession that would require him to pursue purity of style at the expense of purity or truth or dignity of expression, still less at the expense of integrity of material or soundness of construction.