I enclose the letter to Burnham about boats, thinking that you may as well give it to him with a view to immediate conversation on the subject. After which if the Japanese Commission is still in Chicago, I want you to press them to send boats and bamboo—bamboo and boats. Pleasure boats, and fishing boats fully equipped with families living on them. The pleasure boats, (yachts,) with tubs of flowers on their quarter deck, as the Chinese boats of the class had that I saw at Canton.

I think that you can have a useful interview with the Japs. Tell them that the trade in plants might be vastly enlarged. Permanently so. With their cheap labor and patient handicraft in such matters they can export much at lower rates than we can grow them for, and we would have them take this opportunity to show what they can do. Especially in all varieties of bamboo especially those hardy in North Japan.

Yours Truly

Reaching home after a long journey I find a telegram asking me to give your Committee at once a statement of my view of the proposed [496]speedtrack on the Central Park; also letters of the same purport from a number of citizens.

The earnings of the people of New York have been put into the Central Park for an object. The question is whether the speed-track would be consistent with that object. If not, it would be as unreasonable, unjust and immoral a use of the Park as any other diversion of public property to an object inconsistent with that for which such property had been acquired.

As far as I have had a hand in determining to what object the Central Park should be adapted, my testimony is that the speed-track would be such a diversion, and that if not unconstitutional and illegal, it fails to be so only because those who give form to constitutions and laws are not in all technical points successful in accomplishing the objects with which they are charged.

The speed-track would thus, in my judgment, lessen the security of every man to the enjoyment of his earnings, and tend directly to anarchy.

Respectfully Yours